Thirteen Ways of Looking Read online

  Nothing but misery everywhere, truth be told. Why don’t we say that the whole world’s a madhouse and simply, then, leave it be? Isn’t that right, Sally? I’d bet there’s even some form of carry-on going down in wherever it is you’re from.

  —Sally!

  She is busy down in the bedroom, vacuuming and singing her sweet head off. An eternity ago, my mother used to sing to me too while cleaning the house. Far away, far away. In the kitchen. The stove was large and red and potbellied. A giant stovepipe, painted blue for some reason. Standing there with flour on her hands. Wiping them on the front of her apron. All the old Lithuanian tunes. Mountain flowers and frozen canals and riverbanks and ferryboats.

  Vilnius, Vilno, Wilna, Wilno. The world has a complicated geography. In later years his mother filled him in on the particulars of his birthplace—the knifeblade used for making ice skates, the way the moonlight fell upon the rivers, the small red jacket he always wore, the gloves she stitched with elastic inside his sleeves, how they bounced when he ran along through Kalnų Park. Once a dog chased him, attracted by the bounce of his gloves. Dark dogs everywhere. He had nightmares after that. Then the daytime itself installed the dark. They got out of the city just in time. His mother had a feeling of what was in the air. How many wars had there been already? Poor Vilnius, Vilno, Wilna, Wilno, renamed at every turn. How many times had it been run and overrun? A great dignified city, all yellow brick, high cornicework, but pierced with bullet after bullet. His father, a well-known doctor, sold the house on Vokiečių Street, took the savings, bundled the family on a train bound for Paris. It was still a time when borders could be crossed with ease. They had plenty of money to get by. No hidden jewelry. No blessings from the rabbi. No furtive prayers. No curses either. No ghetto-quarter narrative. No babies thrown from the windows. His mother had dropped nearly all tradition behind her. It didn’t interest her to be Lithuanian, or Polish, or Russian or anything else for that matter, not even Jewish. His father, too, was a stern atheist. Not at all interested in the formalities, though he would sometimes read the Torah and even recite parts of the Kaddish, saying that lines of it were a recipe for great thinking. In this holy place, and every other, may there come abundant peace. Or something like that. Bow to the left, bow to the right. And it would be something indeed, wouldn’t it? Abundant peace? Two chances, as they say: slim and none.

  The steam train rattled past the tall thin trees of Germany, Belgium, France. They lived in a hotel on the banks of the Seine. At night they gathered in the hotel kitchen, around the radio, the intimate fireside of the world, all that flaming hatred, ash, the sundering of Europe. The nights of long knives, the weeks, the months, the years.

  But then it was Dublin, in the middle of the war. His father got a job in the Royal College of Surgeons. A city taking its ease under a bountiful sky. Applauding its own grayness. A hat of it, a homburg, a derby of drab. He loved it there. His happiest two summers. A house on Leeson Street not far from the canal. Ten years old, he wore shorts with garters and long elastic socks. Bobbed along the cobbled streets, came home to a warm fire in the early dark. A staircase. A long dining table. Two silver candlesticks in the middle. Oh, the mind itself is a deep, deep well. Lower me down and let me touch water. He even tried to acquire for himself a Dublin accent. Two chances there also: none and sweet fuck-all.

  Out in the morning, he would run full tilt towards the canal. There were two gorgeous swans that twined their necks around one another. In the afternoons his mother took him for walks along the grassy banks where he was allowed to strip down to his undershorts and jump in, pale and skinny, with the other boys. For some reason he could never work out, he was called Quinn and then, after a while, Quinner. Maybe he looked like a boy of that same name, or perhaps there was a Dublin slang in it he didn’t recognize, but he loved it, especially given the fact that a Q did not exist in his language. Quinner! Hey, Quinner! He wrote his nickname out elaborately in lined copybooks. Even his teachers latched on to the name, and when he handed in assignments he wrote Peter J. Quinn Mendelssohn.

  Oh, it takes a lot of volume to fill a life. So said Boris Pasternak. Or at least I think it’s Pasternak. Eileen would know. She used to read it aloud to me at night. The roof over our love has been torn off and is open now to the endless sky.

  In Dublin one of his school reports had said that he had a youthful bent towards philosophical inquiry. A youthful bent! Philosophical inquiry! Eleven years old! Surely only the Jesuits were capable of a phrase like that. They saw great promise in him. Overlooked his background, slipped him books of Catholic substance. He walked home along the canals with Aquinas rattling around in his head. But on summer afternoons all he wanted to do was to jump off the dark canal locks, holding his knees to cannonball into the water. There was even a photograph taken of him on June 15, 1944, published in The Irish Press, caught in mid-air, his whole body bundled, his ribs tight, his arms ropy, the length of the canal dark behind him, the sky above him white, a look of fierce concentration on his face. The caption read, simply, Boy above Canal. His mother bought all the copies she could find in the small shop on Baggot Street Bridge. They have yellowed and even disintegrated now, but not the memory: it was her next door, quite literally, in the very next house—and she came across and slipped the newspaper clipping under the door. He watched her from the bay window. Eileen Daly. Even then she was a beauty. Alabaster skin and a row of dainty freckles paintbrushed across her nose. So beautiful in fact that he never talked to her at all in those years. Not once. Not even a glancing hello or goodbye or how are you Eileen Daly, isn’t it a fine Dublin day? But he watched her from afar and she took his breath away. A hollowing-out of his stomach.

  The day he left Dublin, oh, the day. It was bright and dappled, a surprise of sunshine. The hackney pulled up outside, a large silver car, an air horn on the side with a loud commanding blast. The bags were packed. The suitcases were loaded. He hid himself in the cupboard underneath the stairs. America. He didn’t want to go. Didn’t want to leave Ireland at all. But his father had a job offer. A letter had arrived. Elaborate handwriting. An eight-cent stamp with a picture of a twin-motored transport plane. An invitation, or maybe an accusation. Another continent. He was dragged out from underneath the stairs, shoved down the steps and into the waiting car. He glanced backwards through the rear window and there she was, Eileen Daly, all eleven years of her—or was she ten?—waving to him from the window of her living room. The white curtains bracketing her face. Her head slightly tilted. A few wisps of dark hair around her shoulders. Her lips pursed open ever so minutely, as if about to speak. He knew even then that he would see her this way forever, his mind had processed a photograph and seared itself on his brain. He wanted to turn to wave to her again, but the hackney had already reached the corner and he waved instead at a dirty brick wall.

  Ireland.

  Gone.

  A chuisle mo chroí.

  Whatever that means. Love of my heart or something like that. Bubbala, they might say in Yiddish. She had told him once and often, but it was a queer language, Irish, or Gaelic, he could never get the hang of it, it rolled marbles in his throat, the dún an doras, the má sé do thoil é, but the door was indeed shut, the sky went down and fell into the Irish Sea.

  On the boat from Dun Laoghaire he heaved his guts up over the side and looked back towards the land until it became just the white of a wave. A miserable sunshine poured down upon him. He thought at least it could have had the dignity to rain one last time. Then, from Liverpool, they took off for America. The posh rooms. Port out, starboard home. He moped along the deck, Eileen Daly, Eileen Daly, Eileen Daly. Her name lay gentle on his tongue. He wasn’t allowed into the ship’s saloon, or even the library, but there was a billiard room by the first-class cabins where he sat in the corner and began writing her letters, his every waking moment consumed in the glance she gave him from the window. He couldn’t understand how he had never said a word to her: what was it that had paralyzed h
im? They had lived next door to each other for the best part of two years and now here he was writing her page after page, telling her about the sunsets over the water, and the odd way the lifeboats creaked, and his glance back to Ireland, everything and anything, he wrote at a furious pace, head down, fountain pen gliding over the paper, he had never written so much in his life, eleven years old—or was he twelve?—didn’t matter, he had the ancient disease, stupid, ridiculous, endless, it was his very first taste of what he would know later, intimately, wonderfully, the best of the four-letter words.

  Eileen, I leaned, I lean.

  Life is not so easy as to cross a field. Pasternak again. For sure this time, and oh, the mind is indeed a deep stone well, but how often a surprising bucket dips down into it and hits cool water. Eileen read the Russian poet’s books aloud many nights, with her Irish lilt and a blanket pulled up around her neck, soft wool, Avoca, where the rivers met, or so she told him. She was a fount of Irish knowledge, and Russian knowledge, and even Jewish knowledge at times, a Helicon indeed, with some Greek thrown in and a smidge of Latin. Thankfully she never had to see me in the diaper, the nappy, the winter gear, down by those Salley gardens my love and I did meet.

  He tilts his coffee cup and sighs. Empty now, just a small rivulet making its way along the inside of the porcelain. All life slowed down to this. The drip. The drop. The snow white feet.

  Slowly falling, falling slowly. Out the window now. Big white flurries against the glass. That was a story she loved so much too, snow general all over Ireland, Michael Furey singing at the window, poor Gabriel left alone, the descent of his last end.

  He tilts the coffee cup one last time and allows the last drop to fall on the newspaper where he watches it slowly blot and spread. A bi gezunt, his mother would have said. She was always one for the ancient phrase. You have your health, what more do you want?

  —Sally?

  He can hear her now in the kitchen, the rattle-out of the dishwasher, the clank along the rollers. Why in the world she needs to run the dishwasher he’ll never know, it’s not as if I spoiled a hundred plates with marmalade and toast.

  And what is it that he wanted to say to Sally anyway, so deep in thought was he, back in Ireland, the good years, why interrupt them now, except perhaps the memory is so raw, and snow is general all over Eighty-sixth Street, the half-living, and I think she died for love, Eileen, I think she died for love.

  —Mr. J.?

  —It’s snowing out there.

  —Yes, Mr. J.

  Looking at him now, expecting something else. Hardly enough to interrupt her from the dishwasher just to tell her what she already knows, the snow coming down like an argument for snow.

  —I was just thinking, he says.

  She nods and her gold earrings go jangling. Looking at him now very curiously. What is it that goes on in her head? Does she think I’m senile? All age and folly? An old white man in his old white body? Does she think of slaveships coming across the waves? Does she think of her own darling grandson back there in the Caribbean? Isn’t that what she saves for? To send him to school? A good education for her grandson, or is it her nephew? Kindhearted Sally, all her life directed towards that boy. Don’t let him break your heart, Sally. And does she remember the good days I had with Eileen? Does she recall the fine household we had? Though truth be told, they sometimes went at it hammer and tongs, Sally and Eileen, many a good argument indeed, black and white, and Eileen had a sharp tongue on her, she could sometimes cut Sally down, the big tall tree tumbling, and oh, what is it I wanted to say, what did I need?

  —I think I’d like to go to Chialli’s today, Sally.

  His almost daily ritual.

  —Yes, sir. In the snow?

  —In the snow, yes, ma’am.

  —You made you a reservation?

  He scoots backwards in his chair. I do indeed have a reservation, Sally, though truth be told it’s more with your grammar, not the restaurant. Hardly worth it to correct her now, let bygods be bygones.

  —What time is it, Sally?

  —Ten fifteen, sir.

  —Let’s make one for one.

  —Sir?

  —One o’clock, Sally. Call Chialli’s. And I’ll call Elliot. Maybe he can drag himself away for once.

  She is lovely, once and always, Sally James, moonlight in her hair, wherever she walks cool breezes fan the glade, I strolled with her beneath the leafy shade, oh, I never kissed a black woman in my life, but it must be said that many of them have beautiful lips, and teeth to match, but not Sally, more’s the pity, or maybe just as well, no ancient temptations. Still and all, the old songs are always the best.

  —Yes, sir, Mr. J.

  —Thank you, Sally.

  One never forgets the first kiss though, and while there were a few before Eileen—some that were paid for, if truth be told, in Dresden, the shiksas along the barrack walls who were known for their questionable virginity—it was really just all Eileen, and even if she wasn’t the first, she was, she always would be, now and tomorrow and the day after. How many letters did he send to her over the years? Hundreds, thousands even. Eileen Daily, she once called herself. Lovely once and always, with moonlight in her hair. He wrote to her from his high school in the Bronx. He wrote to her from the corridors of Fordham. He wrote to her when he joined the Air Force. And all that time he had never even said a single word to her, face-to-face. How odd it was to know someone so well and never have talked a single word in her presence. There was, of course, the telephone, and they had chatted down the wires, perplexed by one another’s accents, but never face-to-face, and it was not until 1952 when he was stationed in Dresden, an office job, checking flight patterns, an awful bore, day in, day out, reams of paperwork, clouds of pipesmoke, but he still wrote two letters a day, and she wrote back to him, grand professions of love and literature, and then he had a week of R & R, and he shined his shoes, pomaded his hair, stepped aboard a plane to Glasgow, where he hired a car, and met her in Edinburgh where she was studying literature, and neither of them could ever remember the very first words they spoke to each other, quite possibly they were speechless, but later that night he fell to his knees and asked her to marry him, you’re the love of my life, a chuisle mo chroí, you wrote it to me in several of your letters, I don’t know quite what it means, but marry me, please, Eileen, do. She blushed and said yes, and she lowered her eyelids, and his heart hammered in his shirt, and he said it would be a stylish marriage, though if we’re telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, it must be said that very little is ever truly idyllic, except in retrospect, and, to be honest now, he was just a tiny bit disappointed by Eileen Daly when he saw her first, she was not quite how he remembered her, at the window, in Leeson Street, looking out, raindrops across her eyes, no, she had grown a tad pudgier and her skin was of a pallor that tended away from the pink he remembered, and she was rather ordinary of eye-color, though he soon forgot that, and she became lovely again, if not even lovelier, but if another truth be told—a deeper truth—he was hardly a perfect specimen himself, rather he was a long thin drink of water with a big pair of spectacles on his nose, and anxious eyes, and his trousers at half-mast as if his own body was in mourning for what God gave him, and a skinny set of arms on him, not exactly a nautilus man, he couldn’t afford a carriage, a few stray hairs on his chin, already the fuzz on the dome thinning, a little peninsula on top of his head, and truly he had to admit that, later that night, when he tucked himself into bed next door, that he was getting the better end of the deal, marrying Eileen Mendelssohn, née Daly, and they fit rather well together, hand in hand along Anne Street, the whole world open to them, they would be married in six months and living in New York where she tested her new name on her tongue, and wandered along the Avenue of the Americas in full and righteous bloom, oh, she loved Leopold Bloom, too, that’s for sure, and where in the world did I come up with that phrase questionable virginity?

  Which reminds me, I must ca
ll my errant son.

  Where in the world, Sally, did I put my BlackBerry? Is it here, beneath the newspaper, everything that’s fit to print, anchored down by my empty coffee cup?

  Oh, Eileen, I miss you. Daily, daily, daily.

  V

  I do not know which to prefer,

  The beauty of inflections

  Or the beauty of innuendos,

  The blackbird whistling

  Or just after.

  Poets, like detectives, know the truth is laborious: it doesn’t occur by accident, rather it is chiseled and worked into being, the product of time and distance and graft. The poet must be open to the possibility that she has to go a long way before a word rises, or a sentence holds, or a rhythm opens, and even then nothing is assured, not even the words that have staked their original claim or meaning. Sometimes it happens at the most unexpected moment, and the poet has to enter the mystery, rebuild the poem from there.

  There are thirty-four days of footage from each of the eight cameras in Mendelssohn’s building: 59 East Eighty-sixth Street, between Madison and Park Avenues, just two hundred yards from the restaurant. The first camera captures the double glass doorways of the pre-war building, the high steps, the awning. The picture widens to the far sidewalk, the north side of Eighty-sixth Street. A limited angle, poor depth of field, north to south, recorded with a 50 mm lens. Another in the lobby itself. One in the laundry room downstairs. One on the staircase. One on the roof. One in the elevator. One by the boiler room. Another in the storage area downstairs.