no one seemed to know what to do. Somewhere in the background Carol Castleman was weeping and telling the roomful of girls that her life had been destroyed. But all I could think about now, as I lay on the rug with a lump rising in the center of my forehead, was the fact that my own life had finally begun.
Chapter Three
----
THE HELSINKI-VANTAA Airport is like every other airport in the world, only a little blonder. Not blond like Sweden or Norway, those cool albino hotbeds, but blond enough in patches to make any American take notice. The Finns have a Slavic darkness running right through them, but still there are plenty of fair heads bobbing in this tiny, lovely northern country. I couldn’t help but think this as Joe and I and the rest of our party moved through the airport in a whirl of Finns, some of them taking pictures, some asking questions, all of them wanting something from him, a touch, a word, a gently tired smile, as though his talent might rub off in these casual moments, imparting a little bit of a glow to them, which they would return by giving him a touch of their own brand of Scandinavian goldenness.
They were blond and attractive, so many of these Finns, and the rest of them were simply noble- and heroic-looking, like heads carved on Viking ships, and he was a small, seventy-one-year-old, formerly handsome and dark-haired Jewish man from Brooklyn. But somehow, the lovefest between him and them was boundless, continuing all the way through the airport corridor, which struck me as being as long as a smorgasbord table. Loveme, he seemed to say to them through his glazed and flight-worn eyes.
Yes, we will love you, Mr. Yoseph Castleman, the Finnish people seemed to reply, if you will love us back.
And what was not to love? They had chosen him, hadn’t they—the elderly men who comprised the Finnish Academy of Letters, and the younger ones, too, the hipsters who were probably only in their sixties. Joe seemed not to notice anything, so much was he getting a kick out of the pomp of his arrival; this was what he had been waiting for, always: to step off an airplane and be met like the Beatles landing in America. It would have been even better for him if, like the Beatles, he could have descended one of those shaky tin stairways onto an airstrip, his thin hair whipping around his head, waving his arm to the adoring people below. But instead we had stepped from the plane into one of those carpeted accordion tunnels and then wound up in the early-morning terminal outside the city limits, a clean, white space with eerie, department-store chimes playing and an amplified, soothingly generic female Euro-voice speaking incomprehensibly about departing and arriving flights, and then, inexplicably in English, asking would Mr. Kyosti Hynninen please meet his party at the baggage carousel.
Going past the duty-free shops and kiosks and backlit wall photos of the splendors of Finland, Joe was friendly and charming to the members of the press who approached him and the handful of government representatives with their official clip-on badges that featured tiny images of their own Scandinavian selves, but I knew he was barely listening to anything they said in their careful English. He was high right now; he was ecstatic.
I thought of Joe’s beginnings spent in the female universe of that Brooklyn apartment, his first, bad marriage and its noisy end, his second, long marriage and Joe’s professional ascendance during it. Then the kids, oh the kids! I hadn’t known what it would be like to have a household populated by children. I’d had stirrings toward babies, but fear as well. My desire to have a babywas swaddled in the need to make Joe happy. I couldn’t separate them; I peered into an imaginary carriage and saw Joe’s oversized head poking out from beneath the blanket.
But when they were born, they became themselves, not him. Each child revealed his or her own specifics. Susannah, our first, was given extra
Chapter Three
----
THE HELSINKI-VANTAA Airport is like every other airport in the world, only a little blonder. Not blond like Sweden or Norway, those cool albino hotbeds, but blond enough in patches to make any American take notice. The Finns have a Slavic darkness running right through them, but still there are plenty of fair heads bobbing in this tiny, lovely northern country. I couldn’t help but think this as Joe and I and the rest of our party moved through the airport in a whirl of Finns, some of them taking pictures, some asking questions, all of them wanting something from him, a touch, a word, a gently tired smile, as though his talent might rub off in these casual moments, imparting a little bit of a glow to them, which they would return by giving him a touch of their own brand of Scandinavian goldenness.
They were blond and attractive, so many of these Finns, and the rest of them were simply noble- and heroic-looking, like heads carved on Viking ships, and he was a small, seventy-one-year-old, formerly handsome and dark-haired Jewish man from Brooklyn. But somehow, the lovefest between him and them was boundless, continuing all the way through the airport corridor, which struck me as being as long as a smorgasbord table. Loveme, he seemed to say to them through his glazed and flight-worn eyes.
Yes, we will love you, Mr. Yoseph Castleman, the Finnish people seemed to reply, if you will love us back.
And what was not to love? They had chosen him, hadn’t they—the elderly men who comprised the Finnish Academy of Letters, and the younger ones, too, the hipsters who were probably only in their sixties. Joe seemed not to notice anything, so much was he getting a kick out of the pomp of his arrival; this was what he had been waiting for, always: to step off an airplane and be met like the Beatles landing in America. It would have been even better for him if, like the Beatles, he could have descended one of those shaky tin stairways onto an airstrip, his thin hair whipping around his head, waving his arm to the adoring people below. But instead we had stepped from the plane into one of those carpeted accordion tunnels and then wound up in the early-morning terminal outside the city limits, a clean, white space with eerie, department-store chimes playing and an amplified, soothingly generic female Euro-voice speaking incomprehensibly about departing and arriving flights, and then, inexplicably in English, asking would Mr. Kyosti Hynninen please meet his party at the baggage carousel.
Going past the duty-free shops and kiosks and backlit wall photos of the splendors of Finland, Joe was friendly and charming to the members of the press who approached him and the handful of government representatives with their official clip-on badges that featured tiny images of their own Scandinavian selves, but I knew he was barely listening to anything they said in their careful English. He was high right now; he was ecstatic.
I thought of Joe’s beginnings spent in the female universe of that Brooklyn apartment, his first, bad marriage and its noisy end, his second, long marriage and Joe’s professional ascendance during it. Then the kids, oh the kids! I hadn’t known what it would be like to have a household populated by children. I’d had stirrings toward babies, but fear as well. My desire to have a babywas swaddled in the need to make Joe happy. I couldn’t separate them; I peered into an imaginary carriage and saw Joe’s oversized head poking out from beneath the blanket.
But when they were born, they became themselves, not him. Each child revealed his or her own specifics. Susannah, our first, was given extra
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