24-Hour Read-a-Thon: "Symbols and Signs" by Vladimir Nabokov

An older couple, who had their only child - a son - late in life, have been forced to give him up to an asylum, as he suffers from delusions so severe it's too difficult to care for him at home. On his birthday they travel to the hospital to bring him the only gift they imagine he may accept, that will not provoke his fear of "hives of evil, vibrant with a malignant activity that he alone could perceive, or gross comforts for which no use could be found in his abstract world." They have selected a small set of jars containing different fruit-flavored jellies, a present they believe to be innocuous.

Nervously awaiting their turn to ask to see him, a nurse finally approaches:

"... instead of their boy, shuffling into the room, as he usually did (his poor face sullen, confused, ill-shaven, and blotched with acne), a nurse they knew and did not care for appeared at last and brightly explained that he had again attempted to take his life. He was all right, she said, but a visit from his parents might disturb him. The place was so miserably understaffed, and things got mislaid or mixed up so easily, that they decided not to leave their present in the office but to bring it to him next time they came."

Heartbroken, they trudge back home, disappointed and more than a little worried. Their son had attempted suicide more than once. How could they be assured the strangers who surrounded him would care for him they way they would? Understaffed as the hospital is, and accomplished as their son has become at attempting to kill himself, they decide they'd like to bring him back home.

Will he be any safer at home? Will they, in their advanced years, be able to keep him safe if a hospital filled with doctors can't?And, after his absence, how well-equipped will they be to deal with his quirks?

Paging through the photo album, searching for photos of her son at different ages, his mother mentally remarks how different he's always been from other children, how heart-breaking it is the only child they were able to have turned out to be so strange, so troubled.

"All this, and much more, she had accepted, for, after all, living does mean accepting the loss of one joy after another, not even joys in her case, mere possibilities of improvement. She thought of the recurrent waves of pain that for some reason or other she and her husband had had to endure; of the in visible giants hurting her boy in some unimaginable fashion; of the incalculable amount of tenderness contained in the world; of the fate of this tenderness, which is either crushed or wasted, or transformed into madness; of neglected children humming to themselves in unswept corners; of beautiful weeds that cannot hide from the farmer"

The story ends with a series of three phone calls, each a young girl asking for "Charlie." In each case the mother tells the caller she has the wrong number. Who is Charlie, and who is the caller? Nabokov tells us:

She put the receiver down gently and her hand went to her heart. “It frightened me,” she said.

That leaves us with the question of what, exactly, frightened her. Was it the phone ringing, the possibility it may have been the hospital calling to say their son had been hurt, or worse, or is their son's name Charlie and they believe this must be another man the young girl is referencing? This we don't know. We may only suppose.

This is a story of parental love and the inability of all parents to protect their children, especially when that child is challenged by mental issues. It's also about the unfairness of life, its blindness and the randomness of nature that chooses one child to be normal and another afflicted.

The title, "Symbols and Signs," is a bit obscure for me but I imagine one interpretation relates to their son's illness and the symbols and signs he looks for in all objects, indicating their vindictiveness and wish to harm him:

He must be always on his guard and devote every minute and module of life to the decoding of the undulation of things. The very air he exhales is indexed and filed away. If only the interest he provokes were limited to his immediate surroundings, but, alas, it is not! With distance, the torrents of wild scandal increase in volume and volubility. The silhouettes of his blood corpuscles, magnified a million times, flit over vast plains; and still farther away, great mountains of unbearable solidity and height sum up, in terms of granite and groaning firs, the ultimate truth of his being.

How exhausting to be constantly on guard! But he feels he must be in order to avoid disaster. And his suicidal impulse is, no doubt, a self-defense mechanism designed to save him from the infliction of pain he expects these malignant forces seek to wreak upon him. In killing himself he would be, in essence, robbing them of the pleasure. The prose is gorgeous, the tone - need I say  - dark and contemplative. It's not a difficult story to understand but it is multi-layered, one with the potential to be analyzed should the reader wish to delve more deeply. Here's a site with further interpretation. I know there's far more here than can be worked out in two or three read-throughs. It's one to mentally store away for future thought. But the surface story works, as well, on its own. Lovely and wrenching, leaving the reader haunted and feeling sympathetic toward this much older couple who believe their love can save their troubled son.