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

a blackmailer—I knew that if I was to be “fully adult,” I should break my dependence. Andhe was growing old. Already aged when we began, he was now, at eighty-five or -six, becoming frail. Old age seems to be a series of lurches rather than a gradual decline. One week he was his usual booming self, the next week there was a slow deliberateness in his gait as he came to the office door. Six months later, he could no longer get up reliably from his chair, and once fell down outside the office in my presence. His face, as I helped him up, was neither angry nor amused, just doughy and preoccupied, the face of a man getting ready for something. That was when we switched our sessions to his apartment, around the corner, on Seventy-ninth Street, where I would ring the bell and wait for him to call me in—he left the door open or had it left open by his nurse, whom I never saw. Then I would go inside and find him—having been helped into a gray suit, blue shirt, dark tie—on his own sofa, surrounded by Hofmann and Miró engravings and two or three precious Kandinsky prints.
    About a month into the new arrangement, I decided to move to Europe to write, and I told him this in high spirits and with an almost breathless sense of advancement: I was going away, breaking free of New York, starting over. I thought he would be pleased.
    To my shock, he was furious—his old self and then some. “Who would have thought of this idea? What a self-destructive regression.” Then I realized why he was so angry: Despite all his efforts at fortification, I had decided to run away. Fort Gopnik was dropping its flag, dispersing its troops, surrendering its territory—all his work for nothing. Like General Gordon come to reinforce Khartoum, he had arrived too late and failed through the unforgivable, disorganized passivity of the natives.
    In our final sessions, we settled into a nonaggression pact. (“Have we stopped too soon, Doctor?” I asked. “Yes,” he said dully.) We talked neutrally, about art and family. Then, the day before I was to leave, I went uptown for our last session.
    It was a five-thirty appointment in the second week of October. We began to talk amiably, like old friends, about the bits and pieces of going abroad, visas and vaccinations. Then, abruptly, he began to tell a long, meandering story about his wife's illness and death, which we had never talked about before. He kept returning to a memory he hadof her swimming back and forth in the hotel pool in Venice the last summer before her death.
    “She had been ill, and the Cipriani, as you are not aware, has an excellent pool. She swam back and forth in this pool, back and forth, for hours. I was well aware that her illness was very likely to be terminal.” He shook his head, held out his hands, dealing with reality. “As soon as she had episodes of dizziness and poor balance, I made a very quick diagnosis. Still, back and forth she swam.”
    He stopped; the room by now had become dark. The traffic on Seventy-ninth Street had thickened into a querulous, honking rush-hour crowd. He was, I knew, too shaky on his feet to get up and turn on the lights, and I thought that it would be indelicate for me to do it, they were his lights. So we sat there in the dark.
    “Naturally, this was to be the last summer that we spent in Venice. However, she had insisted that we make this trip. And she continued to swim.” He looked around the room in the dark—the pictures, the drawings, the bound volumes, all that was left of two lives joined together, one closed, the other closing.
    “She continued to swim. She had been an exceptional athlete in addition to being, as you know, an extremely witty woman.” He seemed lost in memory for a moment, but then, regaining himself, he cleared his throat in the dark, professionally, as he had done so many times before.
    “So you see,” he said, again trying to make the familiar turn toward home. And then he did something that I don't