Sometimes Grandma went the other way. Then, in a few hours the phone would ring. Or sometimes a police car — a police car! — would pull up to the curb in front of the house, a green and white police car, and Grandma would emerge with great dignity, contemptuous of the cops who tried to help her out of their car. A green and white police car would pull up. Here is Grandma furiously shaking off the patronizing grip of the Bronx cop as she struggles out of their car.
SEVERAL EXPLANATIONS
In my life as Daniel, I heard several explanations for Grandma’s plunges into the pit. Susan, age fifteen, in her new ivy-league cooclass="underline" “I never knew Grandmother, but from what you say, I suspect it was menopause.” My mother, during a particularly bad spell — I have stopped by the door to watch my father holding the thrashing old woman down on her bed so that the Doctor can give her a shot; small and frail, she is putting up a terrific struggle; and my mother stands at the foot of the bed shouting “Mama, stop it. Stop this nonsense, stop it, Mama!” and then, seeing me stricken pale in the doorway, my mother leads me downstairs and explains why, at the age of five or six or whatever I am, I am subjected to such things … It is simple: Grandma goes mad when she can no longer consider the torment of her life. My mother’s catalogue of the old lady’s misfortunes — the abandoned parents whose brown picture she still keeps in her drawer, the death of her first-born in the street, the death of her two sisters in the big fire, the death of her second-born from the flu, the death of her husband, my grandfather who would have loved me if he’d lived. “What killed him was not tuberculosis, what killed him and killed them all was poverty and exploitation, and that means being poor and being kept poor by people who grow fat and rich from your labor. It’s not fair, is it?”
“No, Ma.”
“Your grandma slaved all her life. To end up with nothing.”
Ignore the reverberations of that remark. Ignore the reverberations. Ignore them. Ignore … My father believed that a life committed to superstition could have no other end than madness, because madness was the disease of fantasy and fantasy of God, or superstition, was itself madness, a predictably abnormal expression of impoverished life. The most enormous problem faced by the Bolsheviks, he said, was education of the peasants. The Russian peasants had been kept in ignorance and illiteracy for so many generations that they were not much more than animals. God was an instrument of the Czar. And Grandma grew up, of course, in the shtetl of a provincial Russian town, a Jew, but also a Russian peasant. My father always gives you more of an answer than you bargained for.
And now let me put down what Grandma herself said about her tunings in and out. Occasionally, after her death, she liked to visit me and press a penny into my palm and bless my head, and call me a good boy. And once I asked her why she felt it necessary to blow her mind in a way so frightening to children. And Grandma said:
“In any one day, it is possible to derive joy from your being and be nourished by it. In a filthy room with cold, broken windows and the clatter of your oppression in the streets, it is possible. And starving, with your teeth rotting in your mouth, and age like lead in your bones, and your eyes shattered with the horror of what you have seen — all together, and with the madness of your children thrown in, I call it God. And there is a traditional liturgy which is lovely in itself, but which reminds you too that others born and died know this feeling also. So I sing to myself in that language. And my curses are my love for them whom I curse for existing at the mercy of life and God and for the dust they will allow themselves to become for having been born. And my complicity in their being, the fruit of my womb, that I could have tricked them this way outrages me. Unable to stay in their presence for my love of them which they do not understand, and my terrible fear of their blasphemy, and their tampering with all the deep, intricate solderings of the universe. Do you begin to understand? I am speaking of the only form of ecstasy allowed to old ladies. It begins with the fear of not being able to breathe. And they inherit that from me, too, as you do, that excess of passion that shimmering fullness of stored life which always marks the victim. What we have, too much life in each of us, is what the world hates most. We offend. We stink with life. Our hearts make love to the world not gently. We are brutal with life and our brutality is called suffering. We scream into our pillows when we come.
“You are a good boy, Daniel. What I mean by that is perhaps only that you have compassion, and that however much I scared you, or however bad I smelled from my asthma, you trusted me enough to accept my pennies and let me call you a good boy. Or perhaps it is that I recognized in you the strength and innocence that will reclaim us all from defeat. That will exonerate our having lived and justify our suffering.”
“Now that scares me more than anything, Grandma.”
“You’re fuckin’ right, Dan. Just remember, though, this placing of the burden on the children is a family tradition. But only your crazy grandma had the grace to make a ritual of it. Ritual being an artful transfer of knowledge. And pennies being the sum of her life’s value.”