Free Through the Children's Gate by Adam Gopnik Page A

sensed …”—and his chin would nestle closer and closer to his chest as his head dropped further, so that I was looking right at his bald spot. There was only one way, I learned, after a couple of disconcerting weeks of telling my troubles to a sleeping therapist, to revive him, and that was to gossip. “And so my mother's relationship with my father reminds me—well, in certain ways it reminds me of what people have been saying about Philip Roth's divorce from Claire Bloom,” I would say abruptly, raising my volume on the non sequitur.
    Instantly, his head would jerk straight up, his eyes would open, and he would shake himself all over like a Lab coming out of the water. “Yes, what are they saying about this divorce?” he would demand.
    “Oh, nothing, really,” I would say, and then I would wing it for a minute, glad to have caught his attention.
    Unfortunately, my supply of hot literary gossip was very small. So there were times (and I hope that this is the worst confession I will ever have to make) when I would invent literary gossip on the way uptown, just to have something in reserve if he fell asleep, like a Victorian doctor going off to a picnic with a bottle of smelling salts, just in case. (“Let's see: What if I said that Kathy Acker had begun an affair with, oh, V. S. Pritchett—that would hold
anybody's
interest.”) I felt at once upset and protective about his sleeping. Upset because it was, after all, my nickel, and protective because I did think that he was a great man, in his way, and I hated to see him dwindling: I wondered how long he would go on if he sensed that he was dwindling.
    Not long ago, I read, in a book about therapy, a reference to a distinguished older analyst who made a point of going to sleep in front of his patients. Apparently, Grosskurth—for who else could it havebeen?—was famous for his therapeutic skill in falling asleep as you talked. It was tactical, even strategic.
    Or was he just an old man trying to keep a practice going for lack of anything better to do, and doing anything—sleeping, booking hotel rooms, gossiping, as old men do—so that he would not have to be alone? Either limitlessly shrewd or deeply pathetic: Which was it? Trying to answer that question was one of the things that kept me going uptown.
    As we went on into our fourth and fifth years, all the other problems that I had brought to him became one problem,
the
New York problem. Should my wife—should we—have a baby? We agonized over it, in the modern manner. Grosskurth listened silently for months and finally pronounced.
    “Yes, you must go ahead and have a child. You will enjoy it. The child will try your patience repeatedly, yet you will find that there are many pleasures in child rearing.” He cleared his throat. “You will find, for instance, that the child will make many amusing mistakes in language.”
    I looked at him, a little dumbfounded—that was the best of it?
    “You see,” he went on, “at about the age of three, children begin to talk, and naturally, their inexperience leads them to use language in surprising ways. These mistakes can really be
extremely
amusing. The child's errors in language also provide the kinds of anecdotes that can be of value to the parents in a social setting.” It seemed an odd confidence on which to build a family—that the child would be your own live-in Gracie Allen, and you could dine out on the errors—but I thought that perhaps he was only defining, so to speak, the minimal case.
    So we did have the child. Overwhelmed with excitement, I brought him pictures of the baby at a week old. (“Yes,” he said dryly, peering at my Polaroids, “this strongly resembles a child.”) And, as my life was changing, I began to think that it was time to end, or anyway wind down, our relationship. It had been five years, and for all that I had gained—and I thought that I had gained a lot: if not a cure, then at least enough material to go into business as