The Hero of This Book Read online

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  But I felt: you are an I,

  you are an Elizabeth,

  you are one of them.

  Why should you be one, too?

  —from

  “In the Waiting Room,”

  Elizabeth Bishop

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  The Hero of This Book

  About the Author

  Also by Elizabeth McCracken

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  This was the summer before the world stopped. We thought it was pretty bad, though in retrospect there was joy to be found. Aboveground monsters were everywhere, with terrible hair and red neckties. The monsters weren’t in control of their powers—the hate crimes, mass shootings, heat waves, stupidity, certainty, flash floods, wildfires—but they had reach. Everyone talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it. Turns out we were supposed to.

  August 2019: I shouldn’t be vague, though that’s my nature. Things felt dire, which now seems laughable. You could still unthinkingly go places. Myself, I’d gone to London, where a heat wave had bent train rails and shut down art exhibitions and turned the English into pink, panting mammals. I, pink, mammalian, panted alongside them. I was trying to decide what I thought about my life.

  On the internet I’d found a small hotel in Clerkenwell, a neighborhood I hadn’t heard of. “Clarkenwell,” the owner of the hotel clarified when I arrived, but I couldn’t get the hang of deforming only the one e and kept calling it Clarkenwall. He was a gentle, blinky Englishman named Trevor, who might have been thirty and might have been fifty. He had a shaved head, hoops in both ears; he wore espadrilles, long loose shorts, and a brown linen vest, which he surely called a waistcoat and surely pronounced weskit. Altogether he looked like someone who was either a vegan or knew how to mindfully butcher a pig and use up every bit, snout and kidneys, trotters and tail.

  Perhaps you fear writing a memoir, reasonably. Invent a single man and call your book a novel. The freedom one fictional man grants you is immeasurable.

  “Here for pleasure?” Trevor asked. “Or is it work?”

  “Bit of both,” I said finally, with an accidental English accent.

  Trevor smiled. His canines were obelisks. “Come this way. You’ll like it here. Full of history. They used to hang people on the green.”

  “Wonderful,” I answered.

  The usual feeling of having my fortune told came over me, as it did whenever I approached accommodation for the first time. Good, I was blessed; bad, cursed. A short list of my minor obsessions: hotel rooms, fortune-tellers, coin-op machines. Embarrassing, how much I refer to fortune-telling in my life—by life, I mean writing. Not memoir: I am not a memoirist. The room at Trevor’s was on the ground floor—a curse—but the photos on the website hadn’t done justice to the green leather armchair or shown at all the little desk in the bay window, the old cast-iron stove set into the fireplace.

  Trevor’s hand, as he gestured, was knuckly and atremble. “Cooker’s original to the house,” he said. “Georgian. There would have been a whole family in this one room. Just the two nights?”

  “Yes,” I said, “alas.” Alas was one of those things I said too often, a way to say no while presenting myself as helpless.

  He nodded. His eyes, like the chair, were oddly green. “I’ll leave you to it.”

  The bathroom had a snub-nosed slipper tub and a toilet that flushed with a pull chain. At the bottom of the toilet bowl in pale-blue letters baked into the porcelain were the words Thomas Crapper—London, Ltd. Such a world, that has such toilets in it!

  I put my laptop on the desk in the window and drew the curtains, to reveal another pair of curtains, and drew those curtains to reveal a sheer panel attached at both top and bottom. There were pubs on either side of Trevor’s place. I could hear the drinking Londoners on the street: conversation, blunt laughter. Two men moved in front of the window like burly shadow puppets, inches away from me. I could see their shapes but not details. “Tenerife’s no good,” one said to the other, bringing his pint glass to his mouth. “Tenerife’s where I fucked up.” I switched on the desk lamp, its glass shade the same Robin Hood green as the armchair. Peter Pan green. Poison green. If the drinkers had noticed me, I would have looked to them like an automatic fortune-teller in a box. Go back to Tenerife, I thought at the man outside, and find your true love. Perhaps I’d write this advice on the back of a business card and push it through a crack at the bottom of the window.

  Never give up your metaphoric bad habits, the way your obsessions make themselves visible in your words. Tell yourself that one day a scholar will write a paper on them, an x-ray of your psyche, with all of your quirks visible like breaks in bones, both healed and fresh.

  I took out the burner phone I owned for international travel, turned it off, and set it on my desk so that I wouldn’t be woken up by a middle-of-the-night text from America. The one person who might need me, the simmering emergency and joy of the past few years, my mother, was ten months dead. The last time I’d been to London was with her in 2016, after the presidential election but before the inauguration, on a lark of a Christmas trip. We’d had an exceptionally good time. I’d only minimally sniped at her. I’d let her make every decision and I’d picked up every check.

  Condoling friends used the words grief and mourning. But neither was what I felt. All my life I’d heard people use those words to discuss the ordinary deaths of elderly people—or, worse, elderly animals—and (I am hard-hearted) I found them melodramatic. Those old people and dogs were never going to be immortal. Grief, as I understood it—grief and I were acquainted—is the kind of loss that sets you on fire as you struggle to put it out. My mother’s death hadn’t changed my mind. I just missed her. I hated to see her go. But she’d had a sweet end, or so I kept telling people, though who was I to speak for my mother? She’d hate that, my opinion about her experience. It was sweet for her family, at home with hospice nurses and cats, and friends around the bed, at a time—2018—when you couldn’t count on a sweet end but it wasn’t impossible.

  At my Clerkenwell (Clarkenwall, Clarkenwell) desk, I read an email from the real estate agent who was going to try to sell my mother’s house in far-off Massachusetts. A crew of professionals had cleaned it, organized the contents, held an estate sale, and then swept all the leftover things into three dumpsters. The estate sale I had attended; the clean-out, as it was called, happened afterward, over weeks, though I hadn’t seen the pictures or heard how much the sale had netted. The real estate agent had grown up in the same Italian American neighborhood as I had (I was not Italian American), with the same sort of name as the boys from my elementary school, which is why I had picked him, though he was ten years older than me and my former classmates, a youngish senior citizen in a blue suit. I didn’t know him, a relief. One of my mother’s neighbors was keen to sell the house for me, had in fact met my mother while canvassing the street for houses to sell, had in fact emailed me to offer condolences and her services. I was tired of people who’d known my mother getting in touch with me, not because they had no claim but because they did. In London, I found I wanted to hoard my little portion of her. I didn’t write back to the neighbor, or to the Russian handyman who worked for my mother and wanted to know whether he should cut the lawn, or to his wife, an enthusiastic though incompetent house cleaner who brought my mother homemade chopped liver and loved her entirely. Mow the lawn? It was a reasonable question. I just didn’t want to answer it. I didn’t even write back to the real estate agent, whose daughter, he said, had taken pictures of the house: The listing would be up by the end of the American day. Let him list the house. Let it disappear without me noticing. It wasn’t a haunted house but a haunting one. It had haunted me a long time.

  Bereaved. That I’d own up to. Bereaved suggests the shadow of the missing one, while grief insists you’re all alone. In London, I was bereaved and haunted.

  The house was for sale. Soon I would have nothing to do with it.

  I didn’t want to see the pictures. I didn’t want to work, either. I closed my laptop and felt the internet burble through the lid, felt it flow into my fingers and hectic wrists. The next day, I decided abruptly, I would spend the whole day out, just my internetless burner phone in my pocket. I would let the city fill my head, and I would be a person on the earth instead of on the internet. I loved the internet, no mistake—the natter, the burble, the possibility of offered love, the opportunity to ask for love and receive it, never unalloyed, perhaps only fool’s love, shining like the real thing, which was sometimes good enough even if it didn’t last so long. The thrill of finding fool’s love was still a thrill. The internet, or my relationship to it, had become a sixth sense, a shitty one, a power I used to divine things, sure, but also a prickling sensation in my organs: There is information out there, better find it! The monsters, too, whose power lived in the way they convinced you that you could defeat them with words they’d never read. I had a fantasy that someday I would meet one or two of these monsters, shake a hand, lean forward, and whisper the one thing each would most hate to hear. You do know you’re going to hell. Fat ass. Everyone can tell how stupid you are. God doesn’t love you. Your wife doesn’t love you. Your children will forget you. You’re going to hell. You’re going to hell. You’re going to hell.

  As for myself, I didn’t believe in
hell or an afterworld of any sort. What netherworld could be more nether than this one? I believed the afterlife was, as an atheist might tell a child curious about heaven, the memories of other people. How my mother would have hated that! To cede control to other people’s brains, when her own brain was what she trusted. Still, she loved being thought about.

  “You know,” said the man on the other side of my window, the one who’d fucked up in Tenerife, “that’s how it is. Do you know what I mean?”

  “Yeah.”

  “But do you know what I mean?”

  My mother distrusted memoirs and I wasn’t interested in the autobiographical and for a long time that made things easy. But writers change even if mothers don’t.

  (Mothers change plenty. Don’t trust a writer who gives out advice. Writers are suckers for pretty turns of phrase with only the ring of truth.)

  Everything makes more sense if you know what my parents looked like. My father was six foot three and, for the last forty years of his life, enormous in every dimension, three hundred pounds or more. Photos reveal that he was relatively thin for parts of my early childhood. That father, the one with a mustache and plenty of sandy-blond hair, has been replaced in my head by the white-bearded fat father, the one children on the street mistook for Santa Claus, which he enjoyed as long as a nearby parent didn’t say, “You better be good, or he won’t bring you any presents!” He was mostly shy. Some people were frightened by his size and silence; in my childhood I sometimes was. He had a stutter and a temper and an encyclopedic memory, a capacious metaphorical heart and an enlarged anatomical one. He didn’t take care of himself. His eyes were large and very blue. You couldn’t tell exactly how many teeth he’d lost to neglect (I don’t remember him ever going to a dentist) because his beard hid it. My mother was less than five feet tall, walked with canes during my childhood, had tarnished black hair she wore in a bun, was talkative, had black eyebrows even when her hair had gone mostly white, was olive-skinned (she said that wherever she went, she met lonely men who mistook her for a countrywoman, spoke Turkish and Spanish and Urdu at her; once, in print—in The New Yorker—a famous friend of my father’s described a dinner with my parents, a “Rabelaisian prodigy” and “his wife, a beautiful Oriental”). She was a Jewish girl of Eastern European descent, born in a small town near Des Moines, Iowa, the older of twin girls. She always loved what made her statistically unusual.

  I have no interest in ordinary people, having met so few of them in my life.

  Any writer will be asked, Why? Why write; why write this book; what made you do it. If I showed you a photograph of my parents, I think you’d understand.

  They met in Des Moines, at Drake University, then moved from one institution of higher learning to another. My mother got her doctorate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison; my father would have but never finished his dissertation. They both taught for a while but eventually ended up at Boston University on staff. We lived in the nearest western suburb.

  After my father’s death, the house became my mother’s house; after her death, my parents’ house again. I don’t know when it stopped being my house, though I lived there for fourteen years, from second grade till I graduated college. Once I moved away, I disowned the house; I worried about it. The place was a firetrap, crammed with stacks of paper, with Jazz Age wiring and addlepated appliances. I tried not to think about it, but I failed. The house might catch fire and burn to the ground. The fire might sweep through the neighborhood. Some municipal official in my hometown (though I never thought of that suburb as my hometown) might call to blame me. The head of the Board of Health. (“If I don’t bathe, I’m going to be condemned by the Board of Health,” my mother sometimes said.) Maybe the mayor would call me up. When I was a kid, the mayor was an exuberant man who, like my mother, was Jewish and dusky, who favored pale suits, and even now when I hear of a generic mayor it’s him that I see. Kid, he’d say. How could you have let this happen? How could you have allowed your elderly parents to live in this shithole?

  What choice did I have? I couldn’t have them arrested. Also, when I moved out, they weren’t elderly. Then they were.

  My mother liked the story of the Collyer brothers, eccentric New York millionaires who collected books and paper and detritus. The way she told the story, one was killed when a pile of books fell over and crushed him; his brother, an invalid, then starved to death. She invoked the Collyer brothers when she thought my father should get rid of some books or maybe find shelves for them.

  Fire, book collapse, flood. At any moment a disaster could befall my parents. Or, worse, nothing definitive would happen, and I would have to make an assessment and a decision: No, you cannot live here another day. I don’t know where you’ll go, but this place will kill you, the house has given you that cough, the house is the reason the wound on your leg won’t heal—wait, you have a wound on your leg that won’t heal, too? The house doesn’t love you; the house wants you dead. I love you and want you alive. Easier to blame the house than my parents, who had let it lapse into this state. Monstrous house: It had eaten my parents and was digesting them.

  When I was a grown-up but still young, I imagined that my parents would eventually face facts and move to a nice apartment in the Back Bay, near their jobs at BU. Maybe they’d give up their car and take cabs. A doorman building, with an elevator. Fresh walls for the art. A spare room with a sofa bed and shelves for books. They already had a sofa bed, purchased from Castro Convertibles, upholstered in a fabric called Herculon. They had the books and the art. All they needed was to get rid of a few things. I thought they might do it.

  Weekends they drove to Maine and Western Massachusetts and bought antiques: entire encyclopedias, oak rocking chairs. Their own parents died, and household goods moved in like a series of avalanches. Stuff got crammed in till leaving seemed impossible. Some cousins only a little older sold their house and moved into an assisted-living complex. My mother was embarrassed for them.

  For a long time my parents got rid of nothing. The rooms filled with objects and garbage, luggage and inherited love letters, cats. In my childhood there had been a lot of animals—four cats and two dogs at the height—but in my parents’ older age it was only ever cats and only ever two. My mother’s favorite cats were male and nervous and needed her. “Come to Mommy,” my mother would say to one of them. “Yes, I love you, too.”

  “You are not that cat’s mother,” I said, sitting on the sofa during a visit.

  “Don’t listen to her,” said my mother.

  I won’t point out the obvious—that my mother never said she loved me—because it’s academic. My mother loved me. It’s not a question. I knew it and she knew it. Her inability to say so felt no different from her inability, her refusal, to speak French. Once in a restaurant in Paris, she stubbornly ordered “the chicken soup,” even though bouillon was a word I’d heard her say dozens of times, followed by the word cube. The closest to a foreign language I ever heard her speak, apart from a smattering of Yiddish, was also really English: When a waiter delivered her plate in Paris, she said messy to him. In Rome, grassy. Saying the words was the problem. Love, too: She knew what it meant, even if she couldn’t pronounce it.

  Still, I wish she had stumbled a little in saying it to the cat.

  My parents were a sight gag. Opposites otherwise, too. One shy but given to monologues, one outgoing and inclined to listen. One with a temper; one affable, sometimes enragingly so. Opposite in every way but their bad habits, which is the secret to a happy marriage and also the makings of a catastrophe.

  Early Sunday morning, and the street outside Trevor’s was silent, as he said it would be: We were near the City of London, the old square-mile city, which cleared out on weekends, when the businessfolk went home. The air smelled as though a river of beer ran close by, though the weather had broken enough that heat wouldn’t be the story of the day. On the next-door stoop, someone had left a crate of empty milk bottles, glass, with bent-back foil caps. I was sorry the milkman—the milkman! A character from a children’s book, the milkman, the sandman, the muffin man—hadn’t been by so I could steal a bottle and drink the milk down, feel the cold of the glass on my lip and the different, thicker cold of the milk on the inside of my cheeks. There are certain emotions available to me only when I am alone, minor longings and notions, a wish to filch and misbehave. This is either my truest self or my most artificial, constructed as it is without a fear of contradiction. Even a single person on the street would have interfered with these thoughts. Above the empty bottles, a note flapped out of the mail slot, the words written in failing felt-tip pen, split on the curves: No milk today, please.