As it turned out, the critics both rejected and accepted him. That first show set the tone for the rest of Bill's career. He would always have passionate defenders and violent detractors, but as painful or pleasant as it might have been for Bill to be hated by some people and worshiped by others, he would become far more important to reviewers and journalists than they ever would be to him. By the time of his first show, Bill was already too old and too stubborn to be swayed by critics. He was the most private person I have ever known, and only a few people were ever allowed to enter the secret room of his imagination. It is ironic and sad that perhaps the most important inhabitant of that room was and would always be Bill's father. Alive, Sy Wechsler was the incarnation of his son's unfulfilled longing. He was one of those people who were never fully present at the events of their own lives. A part of him was not there, and it was this absent quality in his father that Bill never stopped pursuing— even after the man was dead.
Bill showed up for the small dinner at Bernie's loft after the opening, but he was mostly silent, and we all went home early. The next day, a Saturday, I went to see him on the Bowery. Lucille was visiting her parents in New Haven, and Bill told me the story of his father. Sy's parents were immigrants who had left Russia as small children and ended up on the Lower East Side. Bill told me that his grandfather had abandoned his wife and three children when Sy, the oldest, was ten. The story in the family was that Moishe ran off to Canada with another woman, where he became a wealthy man and fathered three other children. At his grandmother's funeral, Bill had met a woman named Esther Feuerstein, and it was through Esther that he learned what no one in the family had ever mentioned. The day after her husband left, Rachael Wechsler had walked into the tiny kitchen in their tenement on Rivington Street and stuck her head in the oven. It was Sy who had pounded on Esther's door and Sy who helped Esther pull a screaming Rachael away from the gas. Despite her encounter with early death, Bill's grandmother lived to be eighty-nine years old. His description of the old lady was unsentimental. "She was nuts," he said. "She used to howl at me in Yiddish, and when I didn't understand her, she'd whack me with her purse."
"My father always favored Dan," Bill said. He didn't make this statement with any bitterness. I already knew that Dan had been an unstable, high-strung child and that sometime in his early twenties he had had a schizophrenic breakdown. Since then, Bill's younger brother had been in and out of hospitals and halfway houses and mental health clinics. Bill said that his father was touched by weakness, that he had a natural attraction to people who needed a helping hand. One of Bill's cousins had Down's syndrome, and Sy Wechsler had never forgotten Larry's birthday, although he sometimes forgot his older son's. "I want you to read the note Dan sent me," Bill said. "It will give you a good idea of what goes on in his head. He's mad, but he's not stupid. I sometimes think he's got the life of at least five people in him." Bill handed me a wrinkled, smudged piece of paper, written by hand.
CHARGE BRO THE RS W.!
REACH THE ACHE!
HEAR THE BEAT.
TO THE ROSE, THE COAT,
THE CAR, THE RATS, THE BOAT.
TO BEER. TO WAR.
TO HERE. TO THERE.
TO HER.
WE WERE, ARE
HER.
LOVE, DAN (I) EL. (NO) DENIAL.
After I read the note, I said, "It's a kind of anagram."
"It took me a while to figure it out, but if you look at it closely, all the words in the poem are made up of the letters in the first line—except the last ones, when he signs off."
"Who is the 'her'? Did he know about your paintings?"
"My mother might have told him. He writes plays, too. Some of them rhyme. Dan's sickness isn't anybody's fault. I think my mother always felt that something was wrong, even when he was a baby, but at the same time, it didn't help that my parents were, well, not really together. By the time he was born, my mother was pretty disappointed. I don't think she had had any idea who she was marrying. By the time she found out, it was too late."
I suppose we are all the products of our parents' joy and suffering. Their emotions are written into us, as much as the inscriptions made by their genes. That afternoon, sitting in a chair not far from the bathtub, while Bill sat on the floor, I told him about my father's death, a story I had only told to Erica. I was seventeen when my father died. He had three strokes. The first one paralyzed his left side, which distorted his face and made speaking difficult. He slurred his speech. He complained of a cloud in his brain that snatched words from his consciousness, and he spent hours typing out sentences with his good hand, often pausing for minutes to retrieve a missing phrase. I hated the sight of my debilitated father. I still dream that I wake up and find that a leg or arm is paralyzed or has simply dropped off my body. My father was a proud, formal man whose relation to me was principally one of answering my questions, sometimes more thoroughly than I wished. A question of only a few seconds could easily yield a half-hour lecture. My father didn't talk down to me. He had great confidence in my understanding, but the truth was that his discourses on the nervous system or the heart or liberalism or Machiavelli often bored me. And yet, I never wanted him to stop talking. I liked to have his eyes on me, liked to sit near him, and I would wait for the signs of affection that always concluded his talks—a pat on my arm, on my knee, or the tender quiver in his voice when he rounded off his speech by saying my name.
In New York, my father read the Aufbau, a weekly paper for German Jews in America. During the war it published lists of missing people, and my father read every name before he read anything else in the paper. I dreaded the arrival of the Aufbau, dreaded my father's absorption, his hunched shoulders, the blank look on his face as he read down the lists. The hunt for his family took place in silence. He never said, I am checking to see if their names are here. He said nothing. My mother and I choked on his silence, but we never never interrupted it by speaking.
The third stroke killed him. My mother found him dead beside her in the morning. I had never seen or heard my mother cry, but that morning she let out a terrible wail that brought me running to my parents' bedroom. She told me in a strange, tough voice that Otto was dead, shooed me out of the room, and closed the door behind her. I stood outside the door and listened to her low guttural noises, to her muffled cries and hoarse gasps. It was never clear to me how long I stood there, but after some time she opened the door. Her face was calm then and her posture unusually erect. She told me to come in, and we sat beside my father's body for several minutes before she stood up and walked into the other room to use the telephone. My father wasn't terrible to look at, but the change from life to death scared me. The blinds on the windows were still drawn, and along their bottoms I noticed two brilliant lines of sun. I studied them as I sat there in the room alone with my father.