Overture

Janet

I

FOR A LONG TIME, I USED TO GO BED EARLY. Or, more accurately, I should put that in quotation marks, because it is Proust’s first sentence. Alternatively, I could say that I, too, used to go to bed early, letting the little adverb insinuate its diffident claim. Suddenly, there are two of us who used to go to bed early. It is not much of a coincidence, is it?

What I am invoking, however, is not my childhood regimen with its early bedtime, which I do not remember clearly, but the nervy gesture of the writer – Proust, of course, but any writer – as he begins one of these monstrous undertakings we call the novel, the enunciation not only of how happy families are all alike, or how it was the best of times and the worst of times, but of the real message, which is that this is an attempt at an extended fiction presuming to represent life over time and that he is – I am – brash enough once again to spin out pages (and pages and pages), letting the sentences form in the hand while inventing characters and situations. And, as if that were not arrogant enough, he tries to imagine an audience, a publisher and a ghostly assembly of readers. Knowing better, I am, also attempting to conceive of something even beyond those improbabilities as I make for those readers and for myself a model of a universe not entirely oblivious that may somehow be paying attention, however peripheral and flighty. 

This is odd theology, as I at once concede, and also dangerous, because it seems to account so well for all the sufferings of those sub-Saharan tribes, of whom the deity has apparently not been keeping close enough track. And there is a long list of other injustices we could adduce, nearer outrages too numerous to mention. On the other hand, and more to the point, this peculiar cosmology could explain the successes of various writers I could name whose work is contemptible but who have been rewarded nonetheless with money, prizes, prestige, academic appointments, and all the perks Dame Fortune has within her erratic gift.  

How, I wonder, does any writer summon up the nerve for that first sentence?  How was I ever able myself to find the courage all those other times?  I am, of course, aware of the possibility of failure, but that is not dismaying or, perhaps, even unattractive. It would bring with it a reprieve, after all. Reaching some cul-de-sac, one comes to realize that the entire undertaking was foolhardy and ill-conceived and, some afternoon, surrendering at last to the promptings of reason, one gives it up to rejoin the rest of humanity, all those people one passes every day on the city streets who are not worrying about tomorrow’s stint and who, when they feel like reading a novel, go out and buy one. 

In any event, to publish is, by its nature, just a bit vulgar. Would it not be better to keep these musings to oneself, working away, if one must do so, without ambition and therefore without fear of rejection, but just for the low-level satisfaction that comes of the making of sentences – or that arises, even more reliably, from the process of revision, which is less risky and more contemplative, and where one has the idea that, whatever it was before, it is slightly better now?  Or anyway less bad. That’s something. 

I do remember an early bedtime, actually, not early in the evening but in my lifetime. I was still in a crib, so I must have been two or three. I have only the sketchiest recollection of this, but from the one detail that has remained with me I can draw inferences and reconstruct the circumstances reasonably well. My parents had gone out for the evening, leaving my aunt to baby-sit. I had been put to bed and, pace M. Proust, had even received my mother’s goodnight kiss before she and my father had departed. But then they closed my door behind them and there was, for a little while, talk that I could hear but not make out – I can imagine it now and am surprised by a sudden pang of yearning – and then silence. It is unlikely that I could actually have heard the barely perceptible sound of the closing of the apartment door, but in my distress I imagined it with dismal clarity, as I do now, translating my distress at their leaving into a sensory event.  It would not have been pitch dark in my bedroom, for there was, I am almost certain, a night light of some kind, and I was quite safe in my aunt’s care in my crib there . . . but I was bereft, terrified as if I had been utterly and forever abandoned, and altogether miserable. I wept and wailed until I was all but exhausted and even then continued to whimper softly. 

Just below the mattress of the crib, there was a kick-bar I must have discovered on some earlier occasion and to which, now, in my despair, I resorted. I had found that if I extended my arm through the bars of the side of the crib and downward, I could just barely reach that metal bar, but it was only now in my grief and rage that I figured out how to slap at the bar and, if I was lucky enough or determined enough and hit it sufficiently hard, cause the side of the crib to fall down. Then it was possible for me to climb over the side of the crib and let myself drop to the floor in a dangerous maneuver that I seem nonetheless to have managed, because what I do remember so many years later, almost as clearly as my slapping at the kick-bar, is my aunt’s combination of amusement and dismay as I kept reappearing out in the living room, and, time after time, she brought me back, put me into the crib again, refastened the side of the crib in its proper position, tucked me in, and told me, gently I should think, that I should go to sleep and stop these absurd and perilous antics.

What prompts such a remote memory?  I saw, recently, at the Museum of Fine Arts, an installation called Under the Table by Robert Therrien, a dining-room table and six straight-backed chairs of enormous size so that a full-grown person could walk underneath the table and look up. The bottom of this table must have been six and a half or seven feet from the ground, and one had a view of the world that had been buried away from toddler years onward but that had never, apparently, quite disappeared. One was again reduced, powerless, vulnerable, as children are (as we all still are, of course, but we learn the grown-ups’ art of denial). That experience of looking up at the underside of the dark wooden table perhaps reconnected me with the small, remote, but not entirely forgotten self who had learned to manipulate the kick-bar and could then fling himself out over the side of the crib and onto the area rug on the floor.  I could have broken an arm. I could, I suppose, have broken my neck or fractured my skull. And I am not now, nor was I then, a courageous person. But if we are desperate enough, we can be driven to heroic actions. And I can remember, however approximately, some taste of the breathless desperation I felt then, that the end of the world was near, that my parents would never come back, that the love and the comfort I had taken for granted were, after all, provisional.

I cannot blame my aunt for her routine reassurances. What else could she have said, after all, to an hysterical two-year-old?  But neither can I blame myself for an irrational panic, for I now understand that my fears were justified and that my sense of impending disaster was by no means unreasonable. How much later could it have been when my mother took me to California in what I now realize must have been a separation, because my parents’ marriage was in trouble?  I had no way then of knowing what their difficulties were, but I seem to have been somehow aware that there were difficulties, which aroused in me not only fear, which is always selfish, but also grief, which, being more general in application, is also more generous. I had infantile eczema, which may well have been in some useless way my response to the stress of their lives. Psychotherapists call this affliction weeping through the skin, after all, and even before I was able to speak I could express my anguish, tearing at myself with the passion of an oblate of some priory of strict observance. My mother used to give me baths with oddly aromatic coal-tar preparations in them. The first word I learned to say, I was later told, was neither mother, nor father, but ointment.

Even now, I am not altogether clear about the specifics of my parents’ quarrels with each another, although I know that the subject of these arguments, the shouting, weeping, slammed doors, and, on occasion, the treble tinkle of smashing crockery, was my grandmother, my father’s mother, a widow to whom my father was devoted – excessively, in my mother’s view – and a woman who apparently knew how to manipulate that devotion and turn it into a weapon against my mother in what both of them understood was a battle that only my father was unable or unwilling to acknowledge.

At last, in her desperation, my mother resorted to a maneuver even riskier than my attempts to escape from the confines of my crib, traveling all the way across the country with me to visit her sister and brother-in-law . . . A visit was what she called it, and she spoke of it to me as if it were nothing more than a pleasant outing, but in the depths of the depression a trip of that kind was not something families of modest means could imagine let alone undertake. My mother was hardly a spendthrift; she must have been truly wretched to take a three year old and go off that way. Was it merely a stratagem, perhaps?  I cannot bring myself to think so, for she was not at all a calculating person. It was, at the least, what I now recognize as a trial separation. 

Of that trip I remember only the wispiest fragments. I did have a vivid  moment of recognition not long ago at a antique car rally when I saw a handsomely restored black Packard, into which I looked hoping to find the plush gray jump seats I could recall clearly from my Uncle Dick’s car. The automobile I was inspecting did not have these, and the owner explained that only the largest model sported such amenities. That was what my uncle must have had, because I do remember sitting in one of those seats, looking back at my mother, and watching through the rear window behind her as a line of royal palms dwindled away behind us. There was also the opening of Snow White and an exhibit the studio had put up somewhere in Los Angeles with life-size statues of Snow White and the dwarfs, but what I am probably remembering is not our visit to that park near the theater but the photograph I must have come across some years later, showing me and my cousins, flanking one of the dwarfs with their little cottage behind us as we squinted into the sunlight facing the camera lens.

And beyond that?  Almost nothing. I wonder, sometimes, whether it is worth living a life, if we retain so little of what we experience. We hope, as we grow older, that we may be remembered, and yet we, ourselves, remember so little. I think that once as an adult, I was taken to the beach at Santa Monica, and I had a vague feeling of having seen it before, but I could have been humoring myself. That familiarity might have been a transplanted impression from a strip of sand and sky and sea on the shoreline of Long Island or Cape Cod. There was the pier, of course, but I might have retrieved that from a movie and conflated it with my vague memories. Or my sense of déja vu could have been legitimately prompted by the quality of the light, or some subtle distinction in the tang of the sea air that spoke to a nexus of neurons that had been hoarding for all those years a subtle sense impression of which I had altogether lost track until this moment of its torpid reawakening.

I have no idea by what blandishments, threats, promises, or simple declarations of love or grief, in whatever combination, and with whatever degree of cunning or luck in the timing, my father at last persuaded my mother to return to him, her senses, her responsibilities, and their life and home, but after the passage of sufficient time for her anger to have cooled and its energy and resolve to have dissipated, she must have come to the realization that the prospects for a separated young woman in a strange city with a three-year-old child in tow were bleak enough to make my father’s arguments, however he had framed them, persuasive. As I mull over these various possibilities, I realize how little I know about my mother’s character, or,