The Invention of Solitude

feelings, and he knew that he cared. But then, when she did come (for a few months, following one of her stays in the hospital), he did not disrupt his normal routine to accommodate her—but continued to spend most of his time out, leaving her to rattle around the enormous house like a ghost.
    He was negligent and stubborn. But still, underneath it all, I know he suffered. Sometimes, on the phone, when he and I were discussing my sister, I could hear his voice break ever so slightly, as if he were trying to muffle a sob. Unlike everything else he ever came up against, my sister ’ s illness finally moved him —but only to leave him with a feeling of utter helplessness. There is no greater sorrow for a parent than this helplessness. You have to accept it, even if you can ’ t. And the more you accept it, the greater your despair becomes.
    His despair became very great.

    Wandering through the house today, without purpose, de pressed, feeling that I have begun to lose touch with what I am writ ing, I chanced upon these words from a letter by Van Gogh: “ Like everyone else, I feel the need of f amily and friendship, affection and friendly intercourse. I am not made of stone or iron, like a hydrant or a lamp-post. ”
    Perhaps this is what really counts: to arrive at the core of human feeling, in spite of the evidence.
     
    These tiniest of images: incorrigible, lodged in the mud of memory, neither buried nor wholly retrievable. And yet each one, in itself, a fleeting resurrection, a moment otherwise lost. The way he walked, for example, weirdly balanced, bouncing on the balls of his feet, as if he were about to pitch forward, blindly, into the unknown. Or the way he hunched over the table as he ate, his shoulders tensed, always merely consuming the food, never savoring it. Or else the smells that emanated from the cars he used for work: fumes, leaking oil, exhaust; the clutter of cold metal tools; the constant rattle as the car moved. A memory of the day I went driving with him through downtown Newark, no more than six years old, and he slammed down on the brakes, the jolt of it flinging my head against the dashboard: the sudden swarm of black people around the car to see if I was all right, especially the woman who thrust a vanilla ice cream cone at me through the open window, and my say ing “ no thank you, ” very politely, too stunned to know what I really wanted. Or else another day in another car, some years later, when my father spat out the window only to realize that the window had not been lowered, and my boundless, irrational delight at see ing the saliva slither down the glass. And still, as a little boy, how he would sometimes take me with him to Jewish restaurants in neighborhoods I had never seen before, dark places filled with old people, each table graced with a tinted blue seltzer bottle, and how I would grow queasy, leave my food untouched, and content myself with watching him wolf down borscht, pirogen, and boiled meats covered with horse radish. I, who was being brought up as an American boy, who knew less about my ancestors than I did about Hopalong Cassidy ’ s hat. Or how, when I was twelve or thirteen, and wanted desperately to go somewhere with a couple of my friends, I called him at work to get his permission, and he said to me, at a loss, not knowing how to put it, “ You ’ re just a bunch of greenhorns, ” and how, for years afterward, my friends and I (one of them now dead, of a heroin overdose) would repeat those words as a piece of folklore, a nostalgic joke.
     
    The size of his hands. Their callusses.
    Eating the skin off the top of hot chocolate.
    Tea with lemon.
    The pairs of black, horn-rimmed glasses scattered through the house: on kitchen counters, on table tops, at the edge of the bath room sink—always open, lying there like some strange, unclassi fied form of animal.
    Watching him play tennis.
    The way his knees sometimes buckled when he walked.
    His face.
    His resemblance to Abraham Lincoln, and how people always remarked on it.
    His fearlessness with dogs.
    His face. And again, his face.
    Tropical fish.
     
    Often, he seemed to lose his concentration, to forget where he was, as if he had lost the sense of his own continuity. It made him accident prone: smashed thumbnails from using a hammer, numer ous little accidents in the car.
    His absent-mindedness as a driver: to the point that it sometimes became frightening. I always thought it would be a car that did him