Recently, The New Yorker ran a short story (“The Escape,” by John L’Heureux), which focuses on a character who develops Parkinson’s disease. Click here to read the actual story. Or continue reading my review which, I have to warn you, is full of plot spoilers.
I’ll respond to the six Reader Response Form questions that I use with teachers and students at my charter school in the Bronx.
- Describe in your own words what happened in the pages you just read. What are the main points?
The story follows the married life of Eddie Prior and his wife, Millie. They meet when they are young adults; they’re both at a nightclub. Eddie loses his balance walking down the stairs to the dance floor, and accidentally crashes into two women at the bottom of the stairs, both named Millie. He tries to ingratiate himself with them, but they blow him off. He meets up with one of the Millies on another weekend, and eventually, they marry.
They have a son, Daniel, and a daughter who dies at birth. Their marital bond is rather iffy, but they don’t divorce because they’re Catholic. Their son, Daniel, grows up, marries, and does get a divorce, essentially making this a story about just three people.
Eddie pursues a career as a civil engineer, and after 40 years, he wants to learn to paint – as in, paint pictures that you hang on walls. He sets up a studio in his basement, buys lots of books and art materials, and tries to teach himself to paint. Sometimes Millie comes down and watches him.
His initial paintings are recognizable, in that you can tell he’s painting a farmhouse, a landscape, a still life. They’re also mediocre. He takes an evening painting class. Meanwhile, Daniel is now a tenured professor at MIT who also writes poetry, and one of his poems gets published in a prestigious journal.
Around this time, Eddie’s left pinky begins to shake, then his entire hand. Eventually, a doctor diagnoses Parkinson’s. After this, the drama takes off.
Eddie can’t understand Daniel’s poetry – it becomes a source of conflict for them. Daniel and Millie trek down to the basement to view Eddie’s paintings, and at first, they are both relieved that the pictures show things they can identify. But Eddie and Daniel get into a fight about whether art is more than just representation; during the argument, Eddie has a vision of what art could be: “He had glimpsed – all at once and with great clarity – the infinite possibilities of painting the world of the mind.”
This paragraph describes the story’s turning point:
Eddie gave up painting things as they were and, quietly, provisionally, he moved on, studying the hurried brush strokes of van Gogh, Manet, and Monet, and then the hard, bloody surfaces of Kandinsky, copying what he could understand and leaving the rest, until, inevitably, he found himself lost once again in the mysteries of the white canvas.
Eddie’s Parkinson’s symptoms get worse, but he still paints, and on some days it seems like he doesn’t have the disease at all.
Then Daniel comes home for Thanksgiving and asks to see Eddie’s new paintings in the basement.
I’ll quote again directly from the story:
Eddie propped a canvas on the easel and waited. The painting was large and forbidding. Splintered rocks hung in the air, unsupported, menacing. There was a rawness to it, a lack of life. Only stones – black, gray, an earthen brown edging into bruised purple, that seemed about to topple out of the canvas.
“Holy shit,” Daniel said.
He was astonished into silence, because, if this was a scene from nature, it was a nature rooted in barbarity.
After
dinner, Daniel, Eddie, and Millie return to the basement to view more of
Eddie’s works. They’re all similar:
large, scary rocks about to fall out of the canvas and crush the viewer.
Then Daniel notices something unusual: in the center of every painting, there is a barely visible line running from top to bottom. At first, Daniel enthuses about this recurrent theme in Eddie’s abstract paintings, but then he sees the scarcely visible line as a symbolic representation of Eddie’s mental decline. A crack portending a crack up.
Eddie’s condition deteriorates. Millie tries to persevere as his caretaker, but they’re both in their eighties now, and Eddie keeps falling, so they bring in an outsider, a professional caregiver, to watch over Eddie. Soon it becomes apparent to everyone that Eddie needs to go to a nursing home. They get ready to move him there, and when the day arrives, Eddie goes downstairs once more, where his most recent painting is still on the easel, although this time the thin vertical line down the center has been widened and includes a crimson door.
When Millie and Daniel go downstairs to get him, he’s not there. Just his final, threatening, violent painting with the crimson door.
2. What’s your reaction to the story?
I enjoyed it immensely. The text is easy to read, and as a person with Parkinson’s, I was keen to see how Eddie’s disease progresses. After Eddie gets his diagnosis, the story keeps tabs on Eddie’s myriad symptoms and declining health – while at the same time it elaborates on his growing talent as a painter.
3. What does the story make you think about from your own life?
I still feel like I’m at the beginning stages of PD. I haven’t fallen, I don’t tend to drift off into my thoughts, my arm and hand only tremble if I’m under severe stress or it’s late in the evening and, because I’m at home for the night, I stopped taking Sinemet. I have very few of the Parkinson’s-related problems that Eddie has.
4. Copy a passage from the story that you find especially interesting or unusual.
Millie goes down the basement stairs first. Her steps are deliberate. She will see this to its end, for Eddie. Daniel, behind her, is surprised to hear nothing.
There is no sound, because Eddie is not here. He has disappeared.
On his easel now stands his final painting, finished at last. The cliffs are as menacing as ever, and those gigantic stones still threaten, but at its center is a plain red door.
Eddie has escaped.
5. What makes this passage interesting for you?
These are the final lines of the story. Up until this part, the story was realistic and the prose somehow clear and calm, despite the squabbles among the three characters. The final lines left me breathless.
6. What questions does the story raise in you? What questions are you left with?
What are all the Parkinson’s symptoms that the author includes in the story? I’d like to go through it again and tabulate them.
What research on Parkinson’s did the author do before writing this? Or has he experienced Parkinson’s first hand with, say, a family member?
Where exactly did Eddie go at the end?
Could it be that the author meant to imply that Eddie had already checked out at some earlier point in the story?
What would my doctor, a movement disorder specialist, say if she read this story?
Is Eddie’s last name, “Prior,” significant?
Painting above is “That Which Is Delicious,” 1976, by Clifford Ross
