Free Ballad of the Black and Blue Mind by Anne Roiphe

muttered into an indifferent sky over Vilna, Vilna, a stopover in the years of exile: a burden to carry in the age of reason. Mike Wilson’s great-grandfather hoped that his grandchildren would live in a town where no one could recall Job’s name or identify with his fate. Justice, equality, decent wages, indoor plumbing, it all seemed possible.
    That was the cartoon version. The real story had something to do with brothers quarreling and tuberculosis and a failed hardware business and two children buried in the city of the dead in outer Queens and a wife who was the kind of mother who hit her children whenever the mood came on her. Mike Wilson only knew that his own mother had been kind and dreamy and loved crossword puzzles and mystery stories and his own father had wanted to be a pilot but had become a schoolteacher and no one in the family had been in court for more than a traffic ticket and Ivan’s arrest had not simply been a matter of public shame, but of private despair.
    Dr. H. considered the question of Ivan. There was an explanation for the crime, another side of the story. The young man possessed a soul that had its reasons. Dr. H. preferred to understand rather than judge. Nevertheless he did not admire the behavior of this young man. Was he a capitalist pig or a hungry child who stumbled and broke apart? Why did he fall? Was this the old question of Adam in the garden? Or was it a gene missing a twist, or burdened with an extra curl. Dr. H. knew enough to avoid the problem of good and evil especially when it came to his patients and their children.
    In fact he was angry at Ivan, on behalf of his father and his dead mother and perhaps of all those who didn’t cheat. Ivan came in multiples, Ivan was many Ivans and they all had big bank accounts. Everywhere in the city, money was flowing and falling and changing hands and there was a race going on, a race for the best, most expensive view of the park or the river, there was a pounding on the doors of the stores on Madison Avenue where a hairbrush cost as much as a bus driver’s monthly salary. There were tuitions and clothes and china plates and labels that meant something to those who wore them and the city was rippling with anxiety over who had everything and who had nothing and who would gain more and how to show what one had and how to keep it safe and make it grow and how to be better, a better bigger house in the country, a better bigger home theater, a better bigger cash flow, in and in and in. This was a city in which little children compared the monetary value of their birthday presents. Dr. H. sighed. He himself sometimes regretted not becoming a heart surgeon. Sometimes he too wanted to be able to fly first class to China and satisfy all his wants, one after another. There was a particular range stove he would have liked that cost as much as a small airplane.
    Accumulation, competition, this was the addiction that humbled the city, that caused it to tremble in the predawn hours, the stench of avarice came off both rivers and wore down the citizens of the city, who scrambled like ants building their mountain of grains, fearing always the foot that would smash, the hand that would hammer, the end of the game.
    If one thought of it, money was not so much the root of all evil but the air one breathed, the source of life itself, the energy that turned the wheels that made the city run day after day. Cash was needed not for survival but for flash and bravado, for astonishment and amusement, for security, a goal that kept receding into the mists as you came closer. Security was not a Swiss bank account. It was a state of mind as illusive and fleeting as joy. Once upon a time it was enough if you could feed your family. Now you needed to have more than your neighbor, who must therefore have less.
    In his office with his bookshelves spilling over with old copies of the journals and the periodicals and the volumes of biography and the collected