As they turned away, after the blessing, many of their faces were radiant, and what point would there be in my asking how long their exaltation would last? They must return, many of them, to empty rooms, the care of invalids, bankrupt marriages, contumely, ridicule and despair, but some promise had been made. I went down the aisle myself with one of the last groups. Oh Father I have sinned. I ate more than my share of sandwiches at the picnic. I have performed every known form of carnal indecency. I left my new bicycle out in the rain. I do not love my parents. I have admired myself in a looking glass. Cleanse and forgive me most merciful Father.
Then, standing there with my head bowed, I felt completely cleansed and forgiven. Life was simple, natural, a privilege. My life had a purpose although it was not revealed to me until later. I walked happily back to the hotel.
XIV
In my sophomore year at Yale I petitioned the New Haven court to have my name changed from Paul Hammer to Robert Levy. I'm not quite sure why. Hammer, of course, was no name at all. Levy had for me a pure and simple sound and, belonging really to no community, I suppose I hoped to insinuate myself into the Jewish community. My lawyer spoke eloquently of the fact that I had been born out of wedlock and had been named for a humble and rudimentary tool that had been seen passing a window. The judge, whose name was Weinstock, refused my petition. The New Haven paper carried the story, including the origin of my name, and as a result I was dropped from the social register and lost at least a dozen friends. I have always been astonished to find that bastardy remains a threat to organized society.
I'll skip school and college. When I was twenty-four and living in Cleveland I invested fifty thousand dollars of the money Grandmother left me in a publishing house run by a man I'd known in college. We were both inexperienced and the business went poorly. At the end of a year we mortgaged our firm to a larger publishing house who, six months later, foreclosed the mortgage and copped my investment. I don't think there was any connection-I still had an adequate income-but at about this time I began to suffer from melancholy-a cafard-a form of despair that sometimes seemed to have a tangible approach. Once or twice, I think, I seemed to glimpse some of its physical attributes. It was covered with hair-it was the classical bête noire-but it was as a rule no more visible than a moving column of thin air. I decided then to move to New York and translate the poetry of Eugenio Montale. I took a furnished apartment, but I seemed to know almost no one in the city and this left me alone much of the time and much of the time with my cafard.
It overtook me on trains and planes. I would wake feeling healthy and full of plans, to be crushed by the cafard while I shaved or drank my first cup of coffee. It was most powerful and I was most vulnerable when the noise of traffic woke me at dawn. My best defense, my only defense, was to cover my head with a pillow and summon up those images mat represented for me the excellence and beauty I had lost. The first of these was a mountain-it was obviously Kilimanjaro. The summit was a perfect, snow-covered cone, lighted by a passing glow. I saw the mountain a thousand times -I begged to see it-and as I grew more familiar with it I saw the fire of a primitive village at its base. The vision dated, I guess, from the bronze or the iron age. Next in frequency I saw a fortified medieval town. It could have been Mont-St-Michel or Orvieto or the grand lamasery in Tibet but the image of the walled town, like the snow-covered mountain, seemed to represent beauty, enthusiasm and love. I also saw less frequently and less successfully a river with grassy banks. I guessed these were the Elysian Fields although I found them difficult to arrive at and at one point it seemed to me that a railroad track or a thruway had destroyed the beauty of the place.
I had begun to drink heavily to lick the cafard and one morning-I had been in New York for about a month-I took a hooker of gin while I shaved. I then went back to bed again, covered my head with a pillow and tried to evoke the mountain, the fortified town or the green fields, but I saw instead a pale woman wearing a shirt with light-blue stripes. I seemed to feel for her deeply and clearly during the moment or two that I saw her but then she vanished.
I stayed in bed that day until eleven or later, when I went out to the corner drugstore and ordered some breakfast. The place had begun to fill up with the lunch-hour crowd and the noise and the smells nauseated me. I drank some coffee and orange juice and went back to my apartment and had another drink. I was drinking straight gin. This made me feel better and I had a third drink and went out once more to see if I couldn't eat something. This time I went to a French restaurant where my alcoholic fastidiousness would not be offended. I ordered a martini, some pâte and a plate of scrambled eggs and was able to get this down. Then I returned to my apartment, undressed and got back into bed again, pulling the covers over my face. I hated the light of day, it seemed to be the essence of my cafard, as if darkness would lessen my frustrations, as if the night were a guise of forgetfulness. I stayed in bed, neither sleeping nor waking. When I dressed again and went out onto the street it was beginning to get dark. I went back to the French restaurant, where I had some snails and a beef filet, and then went to a movie. It was a spy movie and seemed so old-fashioned that it undermined my already feeble sense of time and reality. I left halfway through the movie and went back to bed again. It must have been about ten. I took a couple of sleeping pills and stayed in bed until two the next afternoon, when I dressed and went out to the restaurant and had another plate of scrambled eggs. I then returned to bed and stayed there until ten the next morning. What I wanted then was a long, long, long sleep and I had enough pills to accomplish this. I flushed the pills down the toilet and called one of my few friends and asked for the name of his doctor. I then called the doctor and asked him for the name of a psychiatrist. He recommended a man named Doheny.
Doheny saw me that afternoon. His waiting room had a large collection of magazines but the ashtrays were clean, the cushions were unrumpled and I had the feeling that perhaps I was his first customer in a long time.