Free Mr. Vertigo by Paul Auster

I’ll always find a way to pull us through.”
    However he had managed it, the crisis was over. Our larder was full again, and we no longer stood up from meals craving more, no longer moaned about our gurgling bellies. You’d think this turnaround would have earned our undying gratitude, but the fact was that we quickly learned to take it for granted. Within ten days, it seemed perfectly normal that we should be eating well, and by the end of the month it was hard to remember the days when we hadn’t. That’s how it is with want. As long as you lack something, you yearn for it without cease. If only I could have that one thing, you tell yourself, all my problems would be solved. But once you get it, once the object of your desires is thrust into your hands, it begins to lose its charm. Other wants assert themselves, other desires make themselves felt, and bit by bit you discover that you’re right back where you started. So it was with my reading lessons; so it was with the newfound plenty jammed into the kitchen cupboards. I had thought those things would make a difference, but in the end they were no more than shadows, substitute longings for the one thing I really wanted—which was precisely the thing I couldn’t have. I needed the master to love me again. That’s what the story of those months came down to. I hungered for the master’s affections, and no amountof food was ever going to satisfy me. After two years, I had learned that everything I was flowed directly from him. He had made me in his own image, and now he wasn’t there for me anymore. For reasons I couldn’t understand, I felt I had lost him forever.
    It never occurred to me to think of Mrs. Witherspoon. Not even when Mother Sioux dropped a hint one night about the master’s “widow lady” in Wichita did I put six and three together. I was backward in that regard, an eleven-year-old know-it-all who didn’t understand the first thing that went on between men and women. I assumed it was all carnal, intermittent spasms of wayward lust, and when Aesop talked to me about planting his boners in a nice warm quim (he had just turned seventeen), I immediately thought of the whores I’d known in Saint Louis, the blowsy, wisecracking dolls who strutted up and down the alleys at two in the morning, peddling their bodies for cold, hard cash. I didn’t know dirt about grown-up love or marriage or any of the so-called lofty sentiments. The only married couple I’d seen was Uncle Slim and Aunt Peg, and that was such a brutal combination, such a frenzy of spitting, cursing, and clamor, it probably made sense that I was so ignorant. When the master went away, I figured he was playing poker somewhere or belting back a bottle of rotgut in a Cibola speakeasy. It never dawned on me that he was in Wichita courting a high-class lady like Marion Witherspoon—and gradually getting his heart broken in the process. I had actually laid eyes on her myself, but I had been so sick and feverish at the time that I could scarcely remember her. She was a hallucination, a figment born in the throes of death, and even though her face flashed through me every now and then, I did not credit her as real. If anything, I thought she was my mother—but then I would grow scared, appalled that I couldn’t recognize my own mother’s ghost.
    It took a couple of near disasters to set me straight. In early December, Aesop cut his finger opening a can of cling peaches. It seemed like nothing at first, a simple scratch that would heal in no time, but instead of scabbing over as it should have, it swelled up into a frightful bloat of pus and rawness, and by the third day poor Aesop was languishing in bed with a high fever. It was fortunate that Master Yehudi was home then, for in addition to his other talents, he had a fair knowledge of medicine, and when he went upstairs to Aesop’s room the next morning to see how the patient was doing, he walked out two minutes later shaking his head