Leaving the World Read online

  Certainly, Mom put up little resistance some years later when, at the age of sixty-one, the oncologist to whom she had been referred told her she had terminal cancer.

  ‘It’s liver cancer,’ she said calmly when I rushed down to Connecticut after she was admitted to the big regional hospital in Stamford. ‘And the problem with liver cancer is that it’s ninety-nine percent incurable. But maybe that’s its blessing as well.’

  ‘How can you say that, Mom?’

  ‘Because there is something reassuring about knowing nothing can be done to save you. It negates hope – and also stops you from submitting to horrible life-prolonging treatments which will corrode your body and destroy your will to survive, yet still won’t save you. Best to bow to the inevitable, dear.’

  For Mom, the inevitable arrived shortly after her diagnosis. She was very pragmatic and systematic about her own death. Having refused all temporary stop-gap measures – which might have bought her another six months – she opted for palliative care: a steady supply of intravenous morphine to keep the pain and the fear at bay.

  ‘You think I should maybe get religion?’ she asked me in one of her more lucid moments towards the end.

  ‘Whatever makes things easier for you,’ I said.

  ‘Jessie – the nurse who looks after me most mornings – is some sort of Pentecostalist. I never knew they had people like that in Fairfield County. Anyway, she keeps talking about how if I was willing to accept Jesus as my Lord and Savior, I’d be granted life ever after. “Just think, Mrs Howard,” she said yesterday, “you could be in heaven next week!”’

  Mom flashed me a mischievous smile which then faded quickly as she asked me: ‘But say she turns out to be right? Say I did accept Jesus? Would it be such a bad thing? I mean, I always had comprehensive automobile insurance when I was still alive . . .’

  I lowered my head and bit my lip and failed to control the sob that had just welled up in my throat.

  ‘You’re still alive, Mom,’ I whispered. ‘And you could be alive for even longer if only you’d allow Dr Phillips—’

  ‘Now let’s not go there again, dear. My mind is made up. À chacun son destin.’

  But then she suddenly turned away from me and started to cry. I held onto her hand. She finally said: ‘You know what still gets to me? What still haunts my thoughts so damn often . . . ?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Remember what you said to your father on the night of your thirteenth birthday?’

  ‘Mom . . .’

  ‘Now don’t take this the wrong way, but you did say—’

  ‘I know what I said, but that was years ago and—’

  ‘You said: “I’m never getting married and I’m never having children,” and followed it up with the observation that “nobody’s actually happy” . . .’

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing – and found myself thinking: She’s dying, she’s on severe painkillers, ignore what she’s saying, even though I knew that she was having one of her rare moments of perfect lucidity right now. We had spent years sidestepping this issue. But in her mind I was still to blame for my father’s departure.

  ‘You did say those things, didn’t you, dear?’

  ‘Yes, I said them.’

  ‘And the next morning, what happened?’

  ‘You know what happened, Mom.’

  ‘I don’t blame you, dear. It’s just . . . well, cause and effect. And maybe . . . just maybe . . . if those things hadn’t been said at that specific moment . . . well, who knows? Maybe your father wouldn’t have packed his bags. Maybe the bad feelings he was having about the marriage might have passed. We’re so often on the verge of walking out or giving up or saying that it’s all not worth it. But without a trigger . . . that something which sends us over the edge . . .’

  I hung my head. I said nothing. Mom didn’t finish the sentence, as she was racked with one of the small convulsions that seized her whenever the pain reasserted itself. She tried to reach for the morphine plunger that was attached to the IV bag by the side of her bed. But her hand was shaking so badly that I had to take it myself and press the trigger and watch her ease into the semi-catatonic euphoria which the morphine induced. As she drifted into this chemical stupor, I could only think: Now you can fade away from what you just said . . . but I have to live on with it.

  Words matter. Words count. Words have lasting import.

  We never spoke again. I did take some comfort in the knowledge that my parents could never stand each other and that my long-vanished father would have ended it with Mom no matter what.

  But – as I’ve come to discover – there is a profound, vast gulf between understanding something that completely changes the contours of your life and accepting the terrible reality of that situation. The rational side of your brain – the part that tells you: ‘This is what happened, it can’t be rectified, and you must now somehow grapple with the aftermath’ – is always trumped by an angry, overwrought voice. It’s a voice railing at the unfairness of life, at the awful things we do to ourselves and each other; a voice which then insidiously whispers: And maybe it’s all your fault.

  Recently, on one of the many nights when sleep is impossible – and when the ultra-potent knockout pills to which I am addicted proved defenceless against the insomnia which now dominates my life – I found myself somehow thinking back to an Introductory Physics course I took during my freshman year in college. We spent two lectures learning about a German mathematical physicist named Werner Heisenberg. In the late l920s, he developed a theorem known as the Uncertainty Principle, the details of which I’d so forgotten that I turned to Google (at 4:27 in the morning) to refresh my memory. Lo and behold, I found the following definition: ‘In particle physics, the Uncertainty Principle states that it is not possible to know both the position and the momentum of a particle at the same time, because the act of measuring would disturb the system.’

  So far so theoretical. But a little further digging and I discovered that Einstein abhorred the Uncertainty Principle, commenting: ‘Of course we can know where something is; we can know the position of a moving particle if we know every possible detail, and thereby by extension we can predict where it will go.’

  He also noted, rather incisively, that the principle flew in the face of a sort of divine empiricism, saying: ‘I cannot believe that God would choose to play dice with the universe.’

  But Heisenberg – and his Danish theoretical collaborator, Niels Bohr (the father of quantum mechanics) – countered Einstein with the belief that: ‘There is no way of knowing where a moving particle is given its detail, and thereby, by extension, we can never predict where it will go.’

  Bohr also added a little sardonic retort at the end, instructing his rival: ‘Einstein, don’t tell God what to do.’

  Reading about all this (as the sun came up on another nuit blanche), I found myself siding with Heisenberg and Bohr. Though everything in life is, physically speaking, composed of elementary particles, how can we ever really know where a certain particle – or that combination of particles known as an action, an event, another person – will bring us? Einstein, don’t tell God what to do . . . because in a wholly random universe, He has no control.

  But what struck me so forcibly about the Uncertainty Principle was the way it also made me trawl back to that New Year’s Day in 1987 – and how, in my mother’s mind, Heisenberg was right. One launched particle – my dismissive comments about marriage – results in a logical, terrible outcome: divorce. No wonder that she embraced this empirical doctrine. Without it, she would have had to face up to her own role in the breakdown of her marriage.

  But she was spot on about one thing: had that particle not been launched on that given night, the result might have been a dissimilar one . . . and both our lives might have turned out differently because of that.

  I think about that a lot these days – the idea of destiny as nothing more than a random dispatch of particles which brings you to places you
never imagined finding yourself. Just as I also now understand that uncertainty governs every moment of human existence.

  And when it comes to thinking that life works according to linear principles . . .

  Well, another physicist back in the twenties, Felix Bloch, proposed the idea that space was a field of linear operations. Heisenberg would have none of it.

  ‘Nonsense,’ he said. ‘Space is blue and birds fly through it.’

  But stories work best when told in a sequential, linear way. And this story – my story – needs to be told sequentially, as life can only be lived forwards and understood backwards. And the only way I can make sense of what has happened to me recently is by trying to find some sort of significance lurking behind the haphazardness of it all. Even though, having just written that, I know that I am articulating a contradiction.

  Because there is no meaning to be found in the arbitrary nature of things. It’s all random. Just as space is blue. And birds fly through it.

  Part One

  One

  WHERE TO START? Where to begin? That’s the big question looming over all narrative structures, and something we analyzed ceaselessly in graduate school. What is the point of departure for a story? Unless you’re writing a big cradle-to-grave saga – ‘To begin my life at the beginning of my life’ – a story usually commences at a moment well into the life of the central character. As such, from the outset you’re traveling forward with this individual through his tale, yet are simultaneously discovering, bit by bit, the forces and events that shaped him in the past. As David Henry, my doctoral advisor, was fond of reminding his students in his lectures on literary theory: ‘All novels are about a crisis and how an individual – or a set of individuals – negotiates said crises. More than that, when we first meet a character in a narrative, we are dealing with him in the present moment. But he has a back story, just like the rest of us. Whether it’s in real life or on the page, you never understand somebody until you understand their back story.’

  David Henry. Maybe that’s a good point of departure. Because the accidental set of circumstances that landed David Henry in my life sent it down a path I would never have thought possible. Then again, we can never predict where a particle will go . . .

  David Henry. Back at the start of the 1970s, when he was a young professor at the university, he’d written a study of the American Novel, Towards a New World, that was noted immediately for its accessibility and its critical originality. Around the same time, he also published a novel about growing up in a Minnesota backwater that immediately saw him acclaimed as a modern-day Sherwood Anderson, alive to the contradictions of small-town American life.

  ‘Alive’ was the word everyone used about David Henry back then. Towards a New World won the 1972 National Book Award for Non-Fiction. His novel had been shortlisted that same year for the NBA in Fiction (a rare double honor) and was a finalist for the Pulitzer. The photos of him around that time show just why he was such a media star, as he had (to use a line from an Esquire profile of him) ‘classic square-jawed American good looks and a serious sense of cool: Clark Gable Goes to Harvard.’

  He was everywhere back then: appearing on talk shows; writing learned, witty essays for the New York Review of Books; debating right-wing hawks in public forums. What’s more, though he dressed with a certain Lou Reed élan (black T-shirts, black jeans), he never jumped on the radical-chic bandwagon. Yes, he did publicly denounce ‘the Babbitt-like conformism that so dominates one corner of the American psyche’, but he also wrote articles in defense of America’s cultural complexity. One of them, ‘Our Necessary Contradictions’, became something of a talking point when published in the Atlantic in 1976, as it was one of the first critical explications of what David called ‘the two facets of the American psyche that rub up against each other like tectonic plates’. I first discovered this essay while a freshman in college when a friend recommended David Henry’s collection of journalist pieces, Left-Handed Writing. And I was so taken with it that I must have foisted it on half a dozen friends, telling them that it explained, with brilliant clarity, what it meant to be an American who doubted so much about the state of the country today.

  So I was in love with David Henry before I was in love with David Henry. When I applied to enter the doctoral program at Harvard, the essay which accompanied my application talked among other things about how much his approach to American Literature and Thought had influenced my own nascent academic work, and how the thesis I was hoping to write – The Infernal Duality: Obedience and Defiance in American Literature – was so David Henry.

  Granted, I knew I was taking a risk in letting it be known – even before I had been accepted by Harvard – that I already had a preferred thesis advisor in my sights. But I was so determined to work with him. As I was coming out of Smith summa cum laude with very strong recommendations from my English professors there, I was willing to be assertive.

  It worked. I was called down to Cambridge for an interview with the department chairman. At the last minute I was told by his secretary that the interview would be handled by someone else in the department.

  And that’s how I found myself face to face with David Henry.

  The year was 1995. He was now in his early fifties, but still retained the craggy movie-star aura – though I immediately noticed that his eyes were marked by dark crescent moons hinting at a certain sadness within. I knew that he had continued to write essays for publications like Harper’s and the New York Review of Books, though not with such prolific regularity. From a piece I read about him in the Boston Globe I also found out that there had been no second novel and that his long-commissioned biography of Melville remained unfinished. But the article did say that, though his profile as a writer and a public intellectual had faded, he was still a hugely respected teacher whose undergraduate classes were always over-subscribed and who was one of the most sought-after doctoral advisors in the university.

  I liked him immediately because he saw how hard I was trying to mask my nervousness and he quickly put me at my ease.

  ‘Now why on earth would you want to go into something as archaic and badly paid as university teaching when you could be out there cashing in on all the material bounty being offered in this, our new Gilded Age?’

  ‘Not everyone wants to be a robber baron,’ I said.

  David smiled. ‘“Robber baron.” Very Theodore Dreiser.’

  ‘I remember your chapter on Dreiser in The American Novel and a piece you wrote on the seventieth anniversary of the publication of Sister Carrie in the Atlantic.’

  ‘So you said in your application essay. But let me ask you something: do you rate Sister Carrie?’

  ‘More than you do. I do take your point that there is a terrible leadenness to much of Dreiser’s prose. But that’s something he shares with Zola – a need to sledgehammer a point home and a certain psychological primitivism. And yes, I do like the point you make about Dreiser’s prolixity being bound up with the fact that he was one of the first novelists to use a typewriter. But to dismiss Dreiser as – what was the phrase you used? – “a portentous purveyor of penny dreadfuls” . . . With respect, you missed the point – and also used a lot of Ps in one sentence.’

  As soon as I heard that line come out of my mouth, I thought: What the hell are you saying here? But David wasn’t offended or put off by my directness. On the contrary, he liked it.

  ‘Well, Ms Howard, it’s good to see that you are anything but a brown-nose.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I’m sure I’ve really overstepped the mark.’

  ‘Why think that? I mean, you’re going to be in the doctoral English program at Harvard, which means that you are going to be expected to display a considerable amount of independent thinking. And as I won’t work with anyone who’s a suck-up . . .’

  David didn’t finish the sentence. Instead he just smiled, enjoying the bemused look which had fixed itself on my face.

  ‘Professor, you said: “
You’re going to be in the doctoral English program at Harvard.” But my application hasn’t been approved as yet.’

  ‘Take it from me – you’re in.’

  ‘But you do know that I will be applying for financial aid?’

  ‘Yes, I saw that – and I spoke with our department chairman about utilizing a fund we have. It was set up by one of the Rockefellers and is granted to one incoming doctoral candidate every year. Now, I see on your application that your father is a mining executive, based in Chile.’

  ‘Was a mining executive,’ I said. ‘He lost his job around five years ago.’

  He nodded, as if to say: So that’s why money is so tight.

  I could have added how I could never, ever rely on my father for anything. But I always worried about burdening anybody (even my boyfriend) with the more unpleasant facets of my childhood. And I certainly wasn’t going to start gabbing about them during my interview with David Henry. So I simply said: ‘My father told his last boss to go have sex with himself. And since he refused to accept any job below that of the president of a company – and was also known as something of a hothead in his industry – his employment prospects dried up. He’s been “consulting” since then but makes hardly enough to keep himself going. So . . .’

  And I’d just revealed more than I intended to. David must have sensed this, as he simply smiled and nodded his head and said: ‘Well, your winning a full postgraduate scholarship to Harvard will surely please him.’

  ‘I doubt it,’ I said quietly.

  I was wrong about that. I wrote my dad a letter two months before my graduation from Smith, telling him how much I’d like him to be at the ceremony and also informing him about my all-expenses-paid scholarship to Harvard. Usually it took him around a month to write back to me – but this time a letter arrived within ten days. Clipped to it was a hundred-dollar bill. The letter was twenty-one words long: