only a few weeks old. Left her to go with a group of professors to Germany on a mission to help heal the postwar university system there, decimated by the flight and murder of Jews and resisters. Left her to travel after the academic year was done through Italy, Switzerland, and France, meeting with colleagues, looking at art and documents of interest to him in his work. And left us waiting for his safe return to our lives. I didn’t think of it, of course, until years later, how much he must have
wanted
to go.
This is my memory then: the blue chair, the hot day, the big happy baby balanced on my lap, the stranger with the camera. This is the way I have to tell this story, moving from these details into my parents’ lives, my father’s history. Into
how it was
for us. And all the while I feel behind me, over my right shoulder and my left, the sense of both of my parents, of how differently they would tell it, of how different the terms are in which they understood it and felt it. Of how my representation itself makes the story mine, not hers or his. But uneasy and unsure as I sometimes feel as I call up the memories and the words to cast them in, I am the one who has the need to do it.
Chapter Four
WAS THE CHAIR BLUE? As I look at it in the black-and-white photos I still have, I think not, actually. I think it was a desk chair of my father’s, the wood stained dark. I think the blue chair must have been another, later, chair, and I’m confusing the two. But I wonder why. Is it my unconscious impulse as a writer to get at the
blueness
of the two little girls who miss their father? Could I be that corny? It’s possible, I suppose, though it’s not fun to think so.
Was the ceiling in my father’s study in our Chicago house really papered with silver stars in a night sky when we moved in? And if it was, when did they disappear? Some things I’m just plain not sure of. Some I am. Could you not ride one stop past our house on the commuter train from downtown if you wanted to, and see it as you passed? See the windows at its back—my bedroom, my brothers’—the kitchen door, the sagging porch, the grapevine, the mulberry tree arched over the garage and the scraggly yard; see it all laid out as it must have appeared to those thousands and thousands of travelers who flashed by over the years we lived there, who never gave any of it a second thought? Yes. Yes, indeed you could.
This is the way those years come back to me. These images. And then sometimes a detail from them triggers a set of associations that calls up scene and dialogue and also, nearly simultaneously, a larger sense, an emotive sense. What we might call the sense of
how it was.
And if one or two small things are wrong, I let this go. It’s the Proustian triggering action I’m grateful for. It’s the
feeling
I want to get at.
When I write fiction I rearrange memory, I invent memory in order to make narrative sense of it for a reader and for myself, to explain why it’s important—exactly
how it was.
If I have a call, I suppose it is that: to try to make meaning, to embody meaning, in the narrative arrangement of altered and invented bits of memory. To be compelled to do this, actually.
But in this case, in this book, I have to work differently. I have to rely purely on what happened as I remember it, and somehow to make narrative sense of that. This is harder. And it begs the question, Does life
make
narrative sense? Certainly we would like it to. Maybe the recent fin-de-siècle success of the memoir was an expression of that desire and a kind of resulting conviction: yes, it can. It can make sense. If I phrase it just right, look at it just right, it can.
But it’s possible too, I think, that this wish to give life
narrative
coherence may be a substitute for all kinds of other more-or-less vanished beliefs about other kinds of coherence, beliefs about what life
means.
We’re stuck now insisting that, at the very least, it ought to make a
wanted
to go.
This is my memory then: the blue chair, the hot day, the big happy baby balanced on my lap, the stranger with the camera. This is the way I have to tell this story, moving from these details into my parents’ lives, my father’s history. Into
how it was
for us. And all the while I feel behind me, over my right shoulder and my left, the sense of both of my parents, of how differently they would tell it, of how different the terms are in which they understood it and felt it. Of how my representation itself makes the story mine, not hers or his. But uneasy and unsure as I sometimes feel as I call up the memories and the words to cast them in, I am the one who has the need to do it.
Chapter Four
WAS THE CHAIR BLUE? As I look at it in the black-and-white photos I still have, I think not, actually. I think it was a desk chair of my father’s, the wood stained dark. I think the blue chair must have been another, later, chair, and I’m confusing the two. But I wonder why. Is it my unconscious impulse as a writer to get at the
blueness
of the two little girls who miss their father? Could I be that corny? It’s possible, I suppose, though it’s not fun to think so.
Was the ceiling in my father’s study in our Chicago house really papered with silver stars in a night sky when we moved in? And if it was, when did they disappear? Some things I’m just plain not sure of. Some I am. Could you not ride one stop past our house on the commuter train from downtown if you wanted to, and see it as you passed? See the windows at its back—my bedroom, my brothers’—the kitchen door, the sagging porch, the grapevine, the mulberry tree arched over the garage and the scraggly yard; see it all laid out as it must have appeared to those thousands and thousands of travelers who flashed by over the years we lived there, who never gave any of it a second thought? Yes. Yes, indeed you could.
This is the way those years come back to me. These images. And then sometimes a detail from them triggers a set of associations that calls up scene and dialogue and also, nearly simultaneously, a larger sense, an emotive sense. What we might call the sense of
how it was.
And if one or two small things are wrong, I let this go. It’s the Proustian triggering action I’m grateful for. It’s the
feeling
I want to get at.
When I write fiction I rearrange memory, I invent memory in order to make narrative sense of it for a reader and for myself, to explain why it’s important—exactly
how it was.
If I have a call, I suppose it is that: to try to make meaning, to embody meaning, in the narrative arrangement of altered and invented bits of memory. To be compelled to do this, actually.
But in this case, in this book, I have to work differently. I have to rely purely on what happened as I remember it, and somehow to make narrative sense of that. This is harder. And it begs the question, Does life
make
narrative sense? Certainly we would like it to. Maybe the recent fin-de-siècle success of the memoir was an expression of that desire and a kind of resulting conviction: yes, it can. It can make sense. If I phrase it just right, look at it just right, it can.
But it’s possible too, I think, that this wish to give life
narrative
coherence may be a substitute for all kinds of other more-or-less vanished beliefs about other kinds of coherence, beliefs about what life
means.
We’re stuck now insisting that, at the very least, it ought to make a
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