Bernard Malamud, "My Son the Murderer"

dread & magnets

“The son hears him listen.”

Every creative writing teacher has an arsenal of short stories that she knows will work on her students less like pieces of literature than like drugs. Jamaica Kincaid’s “Girl,” Delmore Schwartz’s “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities.” Teachers assign these stories (which tend to leave students silent, staring, quietly chuckling, as if at a magic trick) not to teach particular techniques but to remind them: fiction can do this. There’s a reason we’re here. 

Prominent in my private arsenal is Bernard Malamud’s “My Son the Murderer.” It’s just seven pages long, and outwardly uneventful: a father worries about his twenty-something son, mostly while standing outside the son’s closed bedroom door. At one point a letter comes from the draft board (it’s 1968), but we never learn what’s in it. The story’s climactic confrontation takes place on the empty beach at Coney Island on a freezing February day — the father speaks only a couple of sentences and the son says not a word. The story is like an air bubble in an IV tube: innocuous appearance, murderous power.

The most striking thing about the story, on first reading, is the unfinished quality of the writing. A typical stretch reads like this: 

My son the stranger, he won’t tell me anything.

I open the door and see my father in the hall. Why are you standing there, why don’t you go to work?

On account of I took my vacation in the winter instead of the summer like I usually do.

Malamud — or the story — is too grief-sick, too ulcerous with worry, to bother with quotation marks or the usual typographical niceties regarding shifts in narrative perspective. The father, Leo, is worried that his son, Harry, is going to — well, he can hardly bear to think it. So he follows Harry around the apartment, takes sick-leave from work to be near him, steams open his mail. Which, of course, makes Harry furious — and pushes him ever closer, Leo fears, to doing the unthinkable. Can you blame anyone in this situation for not consulting The Elements of Style? If the story were a person it would be unshaven, red-eyed, worrisomely skinny.

It’s so convincing a performance of anxious dread, in fact, that it feels in places like not so much a piece of literature as a piece of pathology: a gnawed fingernail, a midnight sob. Analyzing it as art feels like commending a 911 caller for her masterful word choice.

“It’s the worst kind of worry. If I worry about myself I know what the worry is. What I mean, there’s no mystery. I can say to myself, Leo you’re a big fool, stop worrying about nothing — over what, a few bucks? Over my health that has always stood up pretty good although I have my ups and downs?”

But it is art, of course. That voice — the Yiddish inflections, the closely heard inarticulacy (What I mean, there’s no mystery) — is as much a product of care and self-editing as the most polished pocket watch of a Henry James sentence. On a second (and third, and three hundredth) reading the story’s brushstrokes become visible. A pattern of symbols comes into view: an egg; heart-problems; a hat that keeps blowing away on the beach. Malamud is a genius at smuggling the tools of literature in the battered briefcase of daily life.

My favorite bit of smuggling takes place at the end of the first paragraph.

He wakes feeling his father is in the hallway, listening. He listens to him sleep and dream. Listening to him get up and fumble for his pants. He won’t put on his shoes. To him not going to the kitchen to eat. Staring with shut eyes in the mirror. Sitting an hour on the toilet. Flipping the pages of a book he can’t read. To his anguish, loneliness. The father stands in the hall. The son hears him listen.  

Here we have a paragraph with only two commas, with a peculiar traffic jam of verb tenses (listens, listening, to him not going), with a positive hail of indifferently referenced he and his and him’s. We are slipping under the story’s dark and deceptively artless spell.

But look again at that last sentence. The son hears him listen. This reads, at first, like a more-or-less simple summation of the complexities of the paragraph. The father is listening, we’re in his head — but the son’s consciousness must be in there somewhere too, because otherwise how does the father know that he’s staring with shut eyes? And what does loneliness sound like, exactly? This sentence (The son hears him listen) seems to function as our first clue to the story’s method — the narrative baton will pass back and forth between the father and son without a great deal of ceremony, and sometimes, as in this sentence, the baton will be briefly held by both of them at once.

So, the sentence is, as a piece of literary architecture, already busy. But what I love about it is something stranger and more elusive. The son is hearing (a silent activity) the father listening (a silent activity). This pair of mutually directed silences reliably raises the hairs on the back of my neck. The hearing son is the negative side of one magnet, the listening father is the negative side of another — and between the two of them is that weird invisible pillow of resistance that anyone who’s ever played with magnets knows well, that energetic gap. It feels like you should be able to close it — the father spends the entire story trying to close it — but you can’t, no matter how hard you push.