Kafka Was the Rage_ A Greenwich Village Memoir - Anatole Broyard [25]
I found a parallel for jazz not in Schapiro’s class but in Gregory Bateson’s. Bateson loved to tell stories, and he told them very well. He was in New Guinea, he said, living with the Iatmul tribe, sleeping in a thatched hut on tall stilts, when one morning he was awakened at daybreak by a sound of drumming. He got up and looked out and saw a lone man walking beneath the clustered huts of the village, beating a drum. He walked in a curious way, this man, in a sawtooth pattern—not turning around to keep to his pattern but stepping backward, heels first. And in counterpoint to his drumming, he chanted a sad, staccato recitative.
Bateson learned that this man had suffered a grievance that he could not get settled. The tribe had rejected his plea for redress and so he got up every morning and rehearsed his complaint to the village. He tried to wake them, to disturb their rest, invade their dreams. Thinking about jazz, I remembered this man and I thought that jazz musicians were something like that.
I was still going to the New School, which seemed to be proof against my mood of disillusionment. My classes met three nights a week and I attended them with a somewhat more dispassionate air than before. It was on one of these nights, after a session with Meyer Schapiro, that I came home to Brooklyn, to find Sheri sitting on my mother’s lap.
I was so struck by this sight that I felt as if I had butted against a glass door, the way people sometimes do when they don’t see it. Sheri and my mother made such a grotesque picture that I thought for a moment I was back in Schapiro’s class, looking at Guernica or a de Kooning.
They were in an armchair in the family room. Sheri was sitting not with my mother in the chair, or beside her, but on her. She was perched on her lap, as a bird perches. In spite of her slenderness, Sheri was much bigger than my mother, who looked like a child beneath her. It was like an adult sitting in a child’s lap. Because of the way Sheri slanted across her, only my mother’s head and shoulders showed; she peered out from behind Sheri. My father was in a love seat across the room.
They were looking at an album of photographs, our family album. I knew those pictures all too well. I could see them in my mind’s eye, my sisters and myself posed against chimneys and cornices on black tar rooftops. Sometimes, in one corner of the picture, clothes fluttered on a line, because people still hung clothes on the roof to dry in those days. My father took us up there because he thought he needed more light; he tortured us with light. When the pictures came out, we looked helpless and blind, like deer caught in the high beams of a car.
This was before people learned to take advantage of the camera, to show it only their best side. The light in our family album was like the glare of truth; there were no shadows in it, just as there are none in the photographs on driver’s licenses. It paled our faces and darkened our eyes, almost gave us wrinkles. My father—for it was he who always took the pictures—caught us red-handed and barefaced. We looked at the camera as if it was to be our last look, now or never. Because these pictures seemed to me to be absolute, artless, and true, I didn’t want Sheri to see them. To see them would be to know too much about me. If she saw me, me as a child, she would molest that child.
I wanted to take the album away from her, but how could I? I couldn’t even talk to her under the circumstances. God knows what I would have said, and how she would have replied. All I could do was watch her and try to keep her in some kind of bounds. Sitting next to my father on the love seat, I gazed at her pale, heavy, unstockinged legs with a mixture of apprehension and desire.
My mother was at her worst, almost helpless, in ambiguous situations. She couldn’t improvise. She was a planner; she liked to count. I could see that she was nervous with Sheri on her lap; she was gulping for air. Yet I was afraid to interfere. As long as I let her sit on my mother’s lap, Sheri would behave up to a point.
My father was,