Becoming Myself

CHAPTER TWO

SEARCHING FOR A MENTOR

Michael, a sixty-five-year-old physicist, is my last patient of the day. I saw him for therapy twenty years ago, for about two years, and I had not heard from him since until a few days ago when he emailed to say, “I need to see you—this attached article has ignited a lot of things, both good and bad.” The link led to an article in the New York Times describing how he had recently won a major international science prize.

As he takes his seat in my office, I am the first to speak.

“Michael, I got your note saying you needed help. I’m sorry you’re distressed but I also want to say it’s good to see you and wonderful to learn of your award. I’ve often wondered how you’ve been doing.”

“Thank you for saying that.” Michael looks around the office—he is wiry, alert, nearly bald, about six feet tall, and his gleaming brown eyes radiate competence and confidence. “You’ve redone your office? These chairs used to be over there? Right?”

“Yep, I redecorate every quarter-century.”

He chuckles. “Well, you saw the article?”

I nod.

“You can probably guess what happened to me next: a flush of pride, all too brief, and then wave after wave of anxious self-doubting. Same old stuff—down deep I’m shallow.”

“Let’s go right into it.”

We spend the rest of the session reviewing old material: his uneducated Irish immigrant parents, his life in the New York tenements, his poor primary education, the lack of any significant mentor. He spoke at length of how much he envied people who were taken in hand and nourished by an elder, whereas he had to work endlessly and get the absolute highest grades simply to be noticed. He had had to create himself.

“Yes,” I say. “Creating yourself is a source of great pride, but it also leads to a feeling of having no foundations. I’ve known many gifted children of immigrants who have a sense of being lilies growing in a swamp—beautiful flowers but no deep roots.”

He remembers my saying this to him years ago, and says he’s glad to be reminded of it. We make plans to meet again for a couple of sessions and he tells me he feels better already.

I had always worked well with Michael. We connected from our very first meeting, and he had told me at points that he felt I was the only one who truly understood him. In our first year of therapy he talked a lot about his confused identity. Was he really the sterling student who left everyone behind? Or was he the bum who spent his spare time in the poolroom or shooting crap?

Once, while he lamented his confused identity, I told him a story about my graduation from Roosevelt High School in Washington, DC. On the one hand, I had been notified that I would be receiving the Roosevelt High School Citizenship Award at graduation. Yet, in my senior year, I had been conducting a small bookie venture handling bets on baseball: I was giving 10–1 odds that any three selected players on a given day would not get six hits between them. The odds were in my favor. I had been doing famously well and always had money to buy gardenia corsages for Marilyn Koenick, my steady girlfriend. However, a few days before graduation I lost my bookie notebook. Where was it? I was in a frenzy and searched everywhere up to the very moment of graduation. Even when I heard my name called and started to stride across the stage, I trembled, wondering: Would I be honored as a sterling citizen of the Roosevelt High School 1949 class or expelled from the school for gambling?

When I told Michael that story, he guffawed and muttered, “A shrink after my own heart.”

After writing notes on our session, I change into casual clothes and tennis shoes and take my bike out of the garage. At eighty-four, tennis and jogging are long behind me, but almost every day I ride on a bike path near my home. I start by pedaling through a park full of strollers and Frisbees and children climbing ultramodern structures, and then cross a rude wooden bridge over Matadero Creek and climb a small hill that grows steeper every year. At the crest I relax as I begin the long downhill glide. I love coasting with the rush of warm air streaming in my face. Only at these moments can I begin to understand my Buddhist friends who speak of emptying the mind and luxuriating in the sensation of simply being. But the calm is always short-lived, and today, in the wings of my mind, I sense the rustling of a daydream readying to go onstage. It is a daydream that I’ve imagined scores, perhaps hundreds, of times over my long life. It had been dormant for several weeks, but Michael’s lament about the lack of mentors stirs it awake.

Cut! The daydream always ends at this point. My imagination balks at completing the scene. I never see my father’s response, or his ensuing discussion with my mother. The daydream expresses my longing to be rescued. When I was a child I didn’t like my life, my neighborhood, my school, my playmates—I wanted to be rescued and in this fantasy I am, for the first time, recognized as special by a significant emissary of the outside world, the world beyond the cultural ghetto in which I was raised.

I look back now and see this fantasy of rescue and elevation throughout my writing. In the third chapter of my novel The Spinoza Problem, Spinoza, while strolling to the home of his teacher, Franciscus van den Enden, loses himself in a daydream that recounts their first meeting a few months earlier. Van den Enden, an ex-Jesuit classics teacher who operated a private academy, had wandered into Spinoza’s shop to buy some wine and raisins and had become astonished at the depth and breadth of Spinoza’s mind. He had urged Spinoza to enter his private academy so as to be introduced to the non-Jewish world of philosophy and literature. Though the novel is, of course, fiction, I attempted as much as possible to stay close to historical accuracy. But not in this passage: Baruch Spinoza never worked in his family store. There was no family store: his family had an export-import business but no retail outlet. I was the one who worked in the family grocery store.

This fantasy of being recognized and rescued abides within me in many forms. Recently I attended a performance of the play Venus in Fur by David Ives. The curtain opens on a backstage scene showing us a weary director at the end of a long day of auditioning actresses for a lead role. Exhausted and highly dissatisfied with all the actresses he has seen, he is preparing to leave when a brash, highly flustered actress enters. She is an hour late. He tells her he is finished for the day, but she begs and wheedles for an audition. Aware that she is obviously unsophisticated, profane, uneducated, and entirely inappropriate for the role, he refuses. But she is an excellent wheedler; she is savvy and persistent and finally, to get rid of her, he gives in and grants her a brief audition in which they begin to read the script together. As she reads, she is transformed, her accent changes, her speech matures, she speaks like an angel. He is stunned; he is overwhelmed. She is what he has been looking for. She is more than he could have dreamed of. Could this be the bedraggled, vulgar woman he met only thirty minutes earlier? They continue to read the script. They do not stop until they have brilliantly performed the entire play.

I loved everything about the performance, but that first few minutes, when he appreciates her true quality, resonated most deeply with me: my daydream of being recognized was enacted upon the stage and I could not contain the tears streaming down my face, as I rose, the first one in the theater, to applaud the actors.

CHAPTER THREE

I WANT HER GONE

I have a patient, Rose, who lately had been talking mostly about her relationship with her adolescent daughter, her only child. Rose was close to giving up on her daughter, who had enthusiasm only for alcohol, sex, and the company of other dissipated teenagers.

In the past Rose had explored her own failings as a mother and wife, her many infidelities, her abandoning the family several years ago for another man and then returning a couple of years later when the affair had run its course. Rose had been a heavy smoker and had developed crippling advanced emphysema, but, even so, she had for the past several years tried hard to atone for her behavior and devoted herself anew to her daughter. Yet nothing worked. I strongly advocated family therapy, but the daughter refused, and now Rose had reached her breaking point: every coughing fit and every visit to her pulmonary doctor reminded her that her days were limited. She wanted only relief: “I want her gone,” she told me. She was counting the days until her daughter would graduate from high school and leave home—for college, a job, anything. She no longer cared which path her daughter would take. Over and again she whispered to herself and to me: “I want her gone.”

I do all I can in my practice to bring families together, to heal rifts between siblings and between children and parents. But I had grown fatigued in my work with Rose and lost all hope for this family. In past sessions I had tried to anticipate her future if she cut her daughter off. Would she not feel guilty and lonely? But that was all to no avail, and now time was running out: I knew that Rose did not have long to live. After referring her daughter to an excellent therapist, I now attended only to Rose and felt entirely on her side. More than once she said, “Three more months till she graduates from high school. And then she is out. I want her gone. I want her gone.” I began to hope she would get her wish.

As I took my bicycle ride later that day, I silently repeated Rose’s words—“I want her gone. I want her gone”—and before long I was thinking of my mother, seeing the world through her eyes, perhaps for the very first time. I imagined her thinking and saying similar words about me. And now that I thought about it, I recalled no maternal dirges when I finally and permanently left home for medical school in Boston. I recalled the farewell scene: my mother on the front step of the house waving goodbye as I drove away in my fully packed Chevrolet, and then, when I vanished from view, stepping inside. I imagine her closing the front door and exhaling deeply. Then, two or three minutes later, she stands erect, smiles broadly, and invites my father to join her in a jubilant “Hava Nagila” dance.

Yes, my mother had good reason to feel relieved when I, at twenty-two, left home for good. I was a disturber of the peace. She never had a positive word for me, and I returned the favor. As I coast down a long hill on my bicycle, my mind drifts back to the night when I was fourteen and my father, then age forty-six, awoke in the night with severe chest pain. In those days, doctors made home visits, and my mother quickly called our family doctor, Dr. Manchester. In the quiet of the night, we three—my father, my mother, and I—waited anxiously for the doctor to arrive. (My sister, Jean, seven years older, had already left home for college.) Whenever my mother was distraught, she reverted to primitive thinking: if something bad happened, there must be someone to blame. And that someone was me. More than once that evening, as my father writhed with pain, she screamed at me, “You—you killed him!” She let me know that my unruliness, my disrespect, my disruption of the household—all of this—had done him in.

Years later, when on the analytic couch, my description of this event resulted in a rare, momentary outburst of tenderness from Olive Smith, my ultraorthodox psychoanalyst. She clucked her tongue, tsk, tsk, leaned toward me, and said, “How awful. How terrible that must have been for you.” She was a rigid training analyst in a rigid institute that valued interpretation as the singular effective action of the analyst. Of her thoughtful, dense, and carefully worded interpretations, I remember not a one. But her reaching out to me at that time, in that warm manner—that I cherish even now, almost sixty years later.

“You killed him, you killed him.” I can still hear my mother’s shrill voice. I remember cowering, paralyzed with fear and with fury. I wanted to scream back, “He’s not dead! Shut up, you idiot.” She kept wiping my father’s brow and kissing his head as I sat on the floor curled up in a corner until, finally, finally, about 3 a.m., I heard Dr. Manchester’s big Buick crunching the autumn leaves in the street and I flew downstairs, three steps at a time, to open the door. I liked Dr. Manchester very much, and the familiar sight of his large round smiling face dissolved my panic. He put his hand on my head, tousled my hair, reassured my mother, gave my father an injection (probably morphine), held his stethoscope to my father’s chest, and then let me listen as he said, “See, Sonny, it’s ticking away, strong and regular as a clock. Not to worry. He’s going to be all right.”

That night I witnessed my father drawing close to death, felt, as never before, my mother’s volcanic rage, and made a self-protective decision to shut the door on her. I had to get out of this family. For the next two to three years I barely spoke to her—we lived like strangers in the same house. And, most of all, I recall my deep, expansive relief at Dr. Manchester’s entrance into our home. No one had ever given me such a gift. Then and there I decided to be like him. I would be a doctor and pass on to others the comfort he had offered me.

My father gradually recovered, and though he had chest pain thereafter with almost any exertion, even walking a single block, and immediately reached for his nitroglycerin and swallowed a tablet, he lived another twenty-three years. My father was a gentle, generous man whose only fault, I believed, was his lack of courage in standing up to my mother. My relationship with my mother was an open sore all my life, and yet, paradoxically, it is her image that passes through my mind almost every day. I see her face: she is never at peace, never smiling, never happy. She was an intelligent woman, and though she worked hard every day of her life, she was entirely unfulfilled and rarely uttered a pleasant, positive thought. But today, on my bicycle rides, I think about her in a different way: I think of how little pleasure I must have given her while we lived together. I am grateful I became a kinder son in later years.

CHAPTER FOUR

CIRCLING BACK

From time to time I reread Charles Dickens, who has always had a central place in my pantheon of writers. Recently an extraordinary phrase in A Tale of Two Cities caught my eye: “For, as I draw closer and closer to the end, I travel in a circle nearer and nearer to the beginning. It seems to be one of the kind of smoothings and preparings of the way. My heart is touched now by many remembrances that had long fallen asleep…”

That passage moves me tremendously: as I indeed draw closer to the end, I, too, find myself circling more and more to the beginning. My clients’ memories more often trigger my own, my work on their future calls upon and disturbs my past, and I find myself reconsidering my own story. My memory of early childhood has always been fragmented, probably, I’ve always believed, because of my early unhappiness and the squalor in which we lived. Now, as I move into my eighties, more and more images from early life intrude upon my thoughts. The drunks sleeping in our vestibule covered with vomit. My loneliness and isolation. The roaches and the rats. My red-faced barber calling me “Jew Boy.” My mysterious, tormenting, and unfulfilled sexual throbbings as a teenager. Out of place. Always out of place—the only white kid in a black neighborhood, the only Jew in a Christian world.

Yes, the past is drawing me in and I know what “smoothings” mean. Now, more than ever before, I imagine my dead parents watching and taking great pride and pleasure in seeing me speak before a crowd. At the time my father died, I had written only a few articles, technical pieces in medical journals that he couldn’t understand. My mother lived twenty-five years longer and, though her poor grasp of English, and, later, her blindness, made it impossible for her to read my books, she kept them stacked by her chair and stroked them and clucked over them to visitors in her retirement home. So much is incomplete between my parents and me. There are so many things we never discussed about our life together, about the tension and unhappiness in our family, about my world and their world. When I think of their lives, picture them arriving at Ellis Island, penniless, without an education, without a word of English, my eyes tear up. I want to tell them, “I know what you went through. I know how hard it was. I know what you did for me. Please forgive me for being so ashamed of you.”

Looking back at my life from my eighties is daunting and sometimes lonely. My memory is unreliable, and there are so few living witnesses to my early life. My sister, seven years older, has just died, and most of my old friends and acquaintances are gone, too.

When I turned eighty, a few unexpected voices from the past awakened some memories. First there was Ursula Tomkins, who found me via my webpage. I had not thought of her since we attended Gage Elementary School together in Washington, DC. Her email read, “Happy 80th birthday, Irvin. I’ve read and enjoyed two of your books and asked our Atlanta library to get some of the others. I remember you from Miss Fernald’s fourth grade class. I don’t know if you remember me—I was pleasingly plump with red frizzy hair and you were a beautiful boy with coal-black hair!”

So Ursula, whom I remembered well, thought I was a beautiful boy with coal black hair! Me? Beautiful? If only I had known! Never, not for a moment, had I ever thought of myself as a beautiful boy. I was shy, nerdish, lacking in self-confidence, and never imagined that anyone found me attractive. Oh, Ursula, bless you. Bless you for telling me I was beautiful. But, why, oh why, didn’t you speak up earlier? It might have changed my entire childhood!

And then, two years ago, there was a phone message from the deep past that began: “THIS IS JERRY, your old chess buddy!” Even though I had not heard his voice in seventy years, I recognized it immediately. It was Jerry Friedlander, whose father owned a grocery store on Seaton and North Capitol Streets, just a block from my father’s store. In his message he told me that his granddaughter, in a clinical psychology course, was reading one of my books. He remembered that we had played together regularly for two years when I was twelve and he fourteen, a time I remember only as a wasteland of insecurity and self-doubt. Since I remembered so very little from those years, I jumped at the opportunity for feedback and pumped Jerry for any impressions he had of me (after, of course, sharing my impressions of him).

“You were a nice guy,” he said. “Very gentle. I remember that in all our times together we never had an argument.”

“Give me more,” I said greedily. “I’ve such hazy images from then.”

“You played around some but, for the most part, you were really serious and scholarly. In fact I’d say very scholarly. Whenever I came over to your place, your head was buried in a book—oh yeah, that I remember well—Irv and his books. And always reading hard stuff and good literature—way over my head. No comic books for you.”