The Blizzard Party

well. Dismiss me. Think nothing of me. He got into the gown and turned so she could tie the neck and back, and when she finished, he turned again and settled his buttocks onto the mattress and reclined into the bed. She took his wrist and pressed, eye on her watch. Satisfied, she leaned over him—a wave of flowery deodorant and beneath it a close, familiar female acridity—and pressed a button on the wall above his head. The overheads went out and he saw through the window the Hudson and, across the ice-clotted river, the lights of Union City. Heaving gusts of snow ticked against the window, and lying quietly in his Arco adjustable, Albert breathed normally as the nurse pulled up his covers, hovered with her hands on her hips, attempting to assess what category this one fell into, exactly: trigger-happy with the call button, a flop-and-roller, a halluciné.
You’re not going to give us any trouble, Mr. Caldwell?
I wouldn’t dream of it, my dear.
She had a keen sense about her patients, something akin to a Secret Service agent’s eye for the pearl of sweat that gives up the assassin in a jubilant throng. For someone who showed up wearing Turnbull & Asser and cashmere socks, this old man wasn’t copping nearly enough attitude with the help.
Albert closed his eyes and concentrated on the hallway layout, and when he concentrated, his face screwed up like someone twisting water out of a towel. He unscrewed it. Concentrate. Wait. He opened his eyes a sliver, detected the outline of the nurse, still there; still there when he checked again, and after a time he adjusted his breathing to signal that he had been overtaken by slumber, and he waited for her to go. He was in a hospital. There was water to the south.

4.
The Blizzard Party. Published 1981 to critical acclaim, a laurel collector, bestseller, kingmaker, an unforgettable, an unputdownable. A cathedral of the mind, a masterstroke, a high-wire act, a virtuoso performance, a breakthrough, a brave and compelling intermingling of autobiography and fiction, a capstone, a new standard, a blah, a staggering blow to those sounding the novel’s death knell, a blah, a bright star in the blah firmament, a singular blah, an act of blah, a blah pointing the way to a new blah, a blah blah, a blah, a blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah.
My father shipped my story to the far corners of the world. He turned that night in 1978 into art, a thing to be passed around by strangers, dismantled and reconstructed, used as an intellectual bludgeon, argued over. A thing that determined the weight of my worth. He’d done some remodeling in the name of fiction, and insisted on calling it a novel, but, as usual, he couldn’t leave well enough alone. He had to complicate things. His heart had been pierced by the gleaming needle of veracity, and thusly afflicted, he chose not to change anyone’s name, so that suddenly I—the flesh-and-blood I who ate oatmeal from a pink plastic bowl at the scarred kitchen table, who struggled to align the seam of her tights with the tips of her toes and demanded obedience of her stuffed animals—collided with the inky I my father had conjured on the page. I became a photo negative, a child-shaped hole into which anyone who’d read the book tried to fit the Hazel they’d met in those pages. The real Hazel. Here’s how it would go: On introduction, adults would repeat my name slowly, eyes narrowed, and I’d get the feeling that I was naked before them, even if I didn’t know why. They had knowledge about me I didn’t have about myself.
This went on for years, until I was old enough to read the book myself and learn what they knew. Surprise: My father’s version of the night didn’t match mine. Some memories generate their own language, their own peculiar logic and associations, coded so that only the bearer of the memory can understand them. I’d developed a juvenile idioglossia to describe that night, a mix of sound and dream and flashes of vision, a language with no English analogue, and here I discovered that my father had published a terrible translation. Not just terrible—he’d translated my story without even consulting the original. It was an invention. Who cared what he remembered? Who cared about his record of events? Who asked him? He’d gotten everything wrong.
Yet, wrong as it was, I was seduced by his perfect description of the Vornados’ apartment and the people in it, the blizzard, the heaviness of Albert Caldwell’s heart. He’d treated me with love, if not with accuracy. To read his novel was to be dropped into an exact reproduction of that night, yet one in which the actors had gone off script and were playing out a completely different story than the one I knew to be true. Reading it was an oddly dreamlike experience, not unlike being caught in an unending state of déjà vu.
He claimed that the things he’d changed, he’d changed so that I could preserve my own past. He’d done it, he said, to protect me, but the disjunction had turned out to be anything but protective. I was fifteen when I first read The Blizzard Party, as unsure of myself as any fifteen-year-old, and I quickly seized on the book as the root of all my problems. Thanks to my father’s novel, no one I’d met since its publication could have experienced the true me. All they’d met was a puzzle, a twin, a chance to speculate. It explained everything, from alienation to acne.
Oh, the pleasures of unfettered indignation. I unleashed my rage on him. I denounced his parentage, made threats to “go public” with my own version, and, finally, treated him to long bouts of silence (silence I’m sure he was only too happy to suffer). It was during one of these interstices,