Which is to say, upon reflection I reverse and distort him. For I suspect that my true father’s sentiments are the contrary of murderous. That one only imagines he begot me; mightn’t he be deceived and deadly jealous? In his heart of hearts he wonders whether I mayn’t after all be the get of a nobler spirit, taken by beauty past his grasp. Or else, what comes to the same thing, to me, I’ve a pair of dads, to match my pair of moms. How account for my contradictions except as the vices of their versus? Beneath self-contempt, I particularly scorn my fondness for paradox. I despise pessimism, narcissism, solipsism, truculence, word-play, and pusillanimity, my chiefer inclinations; loathe self-loathers ergo me; have no pity for self-pity and so am free of that sweet baseness. I doubt I am. Being me’s no joke.
I continue the tale of my forebears. Thus my exposure; thus my escape. This cursed me, turned me out; that, curse him, saved me; right hand slipped me through left’s fingers. Unless on a third hand I somehow preserved myself. Unless unless: the mercy-killing was successful. Buzzards let us say made brunch of me betimes but couldn’t stomach my voice, which persists like the Nauseous Danaid. We … monstrosities are easilier achieved than got rid of.
In sum I’m not what either parent or I had in mind. One hoped I’d be astonishing, forceful, triumphant—heroical in other words. One dead. I myself conventional. I turn out I. Not every kid thrown to the wolves ends a hero: for each survivor, a mountain of beast-baits; for every Oedipus, a city of feebs.
So much for my dramatic exposition: seems not to’ve worked. Here I am, Dad: Your creature! Your caricature!
Unhappily, things get clearer as we go along. I perceive that I have no body. What’s less, I’ve been speaking of myself without delight or alternative as self-consciousness pure and sour; I declare now that even that isn’t true. I’m not aware of myself at all, as far as I know. I don’t think … I know what I’m talking about.
Well, well, being well into my life as it’s been called I see well how it’ll end, unless in some meaningless surprise. If anything dramatic were going to happen to make me successfuller … agreeabler … endurabler … it should’ve happened by now, we will agree. A change for the better still isn’t unthinkable; miracles can be cited. But the odds against a wireless deus ex machina aren’t encouraging.
Here, a confession: Early on I too aspired to immortality. Assumed I’d be beautiful, powerful, loving, loved. At least commonplace. Anyhow human. Even the revelation of my several defects—absence of presence to name one—didn’t fetch me right to despair: crippledness affords its own heroisms, does it not; heroes are typically gimpish, are they not. But your crippled hero’s one thing, a bloody hero after all; your heroic cripple another, etcetcetcetcet. Being an ideal’s warpèd image, my fancy’s own twist figure, is what undoes me.
I wonder if I repeat myself. One-track minds may lead to their origins. Perhaps I’m still in utero, hung up in my delivery; my exposition and the rest merely foreshadow what’s to come, the argument for an interrupted pregnancy.
Womb, coffin, can—in any case, from my viewless viewpoint I see no point in going further. Since Dad among his other failings failed to end me when he should’ve, I’ll turn myself off if I can this instant.
Can’t. Then if anyone hears me, speaking from here inside like a sunk submariner, and has the means to my end, I pray him do us both a kindness.
Didn’t. Very well, my ace in the hole: Father, have mercy, I dare you! Wretched old fabricator, where’s your shame? Put an end to this, for pity’s sake! Now! Now!
So. My last trump, and I blew it. Not much in the way of a climax; more a climacteric. I’m not the dramatic sort. May the end come quietly, then, without my knowing it. In the course of any breath. In the heart of any word. This one. This one.
Perhaps I’ll have a posthumous cautionary value, like gibbeted corpses, pickled freaks. Self-preservation, it seems, may smell of formaldehyde.
A proper ending wouldn’t spin out so.
I suppose I might have managed things to better effect, in spite of the old boy. Too late now.
Basket case. Waste.
Shark up some memorable last words at least. There seems to be time.
Nonsense, I’ll mutter to the end, one word after another, string the rascals out, mad or not, heard or not, my last words will be my last words
WATER-MESSAGE
Which was better would be hard to say. In the days when his father let out all five grades at once, Ambrose worried that he mightn’t see Peter in time or that Peter mightn’t stick up for him the way a brother ought. Sheldon Hurley, who’d been in reform school once, liked to come up to him just as friendly and say “Well if it ain’t my old pal Amby!” and give him a great whack in the back. “How was school today, Amby old boy?” he’d ask and give him another whack in the back, and Ambrose was obliged to return “How was school for you?” Whereupon Sheldon Hurley would cry “Just swell, old pal!” and whack the wind near out of him. Or Sandy Cooper would very possibly sic his Chesapeake Bay dog on him—but if he joked with Sandy Cooper correctly, especially if he could get a certain particular word into it, Sandy Cooper often laughed and forgot to sic Doc on him.
More humiliating were the torments of Wimpy James and Ramona Peters: that former was only in third grade, but he came from the Barracks down by the creek where the oyster-boats moored; his nose was wet, his teeth were black, one knew what his mother was; and he would make a fourth-grader cry. As for Ramona, Peter and the fellows teased her for a secret reason. All Ambrose knew was that she was a most awful tomboy whose pleasure was to run up behind and shove you so hard your head would snap back, and down you’d go breathless in the schoolyard clover. Her hair was almost as white as the Arnie twins’s; when the health nurse had inspected all the kids’ hair, Ramona was one of the ones that were sent home.
Between Sheldon Hurley and Sandy Cooper and Wimpy James and Ramona Peters there had been so much picking on the younger ones that his father said one night at supper: “I swear to God, I’m the principal of a zoo!” So now the grades were let out by twos, ten minutes apart, and Ambrose had only to fear that Wimpy, who could seldom be mollified by wit or otherwise got next to, might be laying for him in the hollyhocks off the playground. If he wasn’t, there would be no tears, but the blocks between East Dorset School and home were still by no means terrorless. Just past the alley in the second block was a place he had named Scylla and Charybdis after reading through The Book of Knowledge: on one side of the street was a Spitz dog that snarled from his house and flung himself at any passing kid, and even Peter said the little chain was going to break one day, and then look out. While across the street was the yard of Crazy Alice, who had not hurt anybody yet. Large of pore and lip, tangly of hair and mind, she wore men’s shoes and flowered chick-linen; played with dolls in her backyard; laughed when the kids would stop to razz her. But Ambrose’s mother declared that Alice had her spells and was sent to the Asylum out by Shoal Creek, and Ambrose himself had seen her once down at the rivershore loping along in her way and talking to herself a blue-streak.
What was more, the Arnie twins were in fourth grade with him, though half again his age and twice his size; like Crazy Alice they inspired him with no great fear if Peter was along, but when he was alone it was another story. The Arnie twins lived God knew where: pale as two ghosts they shuffled through the alleys of East Dorset day and night, poking in people’s trashcans. Their eyes were the faintest blue, red about the rims; their hair was a pile of white curls, unwashed, unbarbered; they wore what people gave them—men’s vests over BVD shirts, double-breasted suit coats out at elbows, shiny trousers of mismatching stripe, the legs rolled up and crotch half to their knees—and ghostlike too they rarely spoke, in class or out. Many a warm night when Ambrose had finished supper and homework, had his bath, gone to bed, he’d hear a clank in the alley and rise up on one elbow to look: like as not, if it wasn’t the black dogs that ran loose at night and howled to one another from ward to ward, it woul
d be the Arnie twins exploring garbage. Their white curls shone in the moonlight, and on the breeze that moved off the creek he could hear them murmur to each other over hambones, coffee grounds, nested halves of eggshells. Next morning they’d be beside him in class, and he who may have voyaged in dreams to Bangkok or Bozcaada would wonder where those two had prowled in fact, and what-all murmured.
“The truth of the matter is,” he said to his mother on an April day, “you’ve raised your son for a sissy.”
That initial phrase, like the word facts, was a favorite; they used it quite a lot on the afternoon radio serials, and it struck him as open-handed and mature. The case with facts was different: his mother and Uncle Karl would smile when they mentioned “the facts of life,” and he could elicit that same smile from them by employing the term himself. It had been amusing when Mr. Erdmann borrowed their Cyclopedia of Facts and Aunt Rosa had said “It’s time Willy Erdmann was learning a fact or two”; but when a few days later Ambrose had spied a magazine called Facts About Your Diet in a drugstore rack, and hardly able to contain his mirth had pointed it out to his mother, she had said “Mm hm” and bade him have done with his Dixie-cup before it was too late to stop at the pie-woman’s.
This afternoon he had meant to tell her the truth of the matter in an off-hand way with a certain sigh that he could hear clearly in his fancy, but in the telling his sigh stuck in his throat, and such a hurt came there that he remarked to himself: “This is what they mean when they say they have a lump in their throat.”
Two mischances had disgraced him on the way from school. Half through Scylla and Charybdis, on the Scylla side, he had heard a buzzing just behind his hip, which taking for a bee he had spun round in mortal alarm and flailed at. No bee was there, but at once the buzzing recurred behind him. Again he wheeled about—was the creature in his pocket!—and took quick leaps forward; when the bee only buzzed more menacingly, he sprinted to the corner, heedless of what certain classmates might think. He had to wait for passing traffic, and observed that as he slowed and halted, so did the buzzing. It was the loose chain of his own jacknife had undone him.
“What’s eating you?” Wimpy James hollered, who till then had been too busy with Crazy Alice to molest him.
Ambrose had frowned at the pointing fingers of his watch. “Timing myself to the corner!”
But at that instant a loose lash dropped into his eye, and his tears could be neither hidden nor explained away.
“Scared of Kocher’s dog!” one had yelled.
Another sing-sang: “Sissy on Am-brose! Sissy on Am-brose!”
And Wimpy James, in the nastiest of accents:
“Run home and git
A sugar tit,
And don’t let go of it!”
There was no saving face then except by taking on Wimpy, for which he knew he had not courage. Indeed, so puissant was that fellow, who loved to stamp on toes with all his might or twist the skin of arms with a warty hot-hand, Ambrose was obliged to play the clown in order to escape. His father, thanks to the Kaiser, walked with a limp famous among the schoolboys of East Dorset, scores of whom had been chastized for mocking it; but none could imitate that walk as could his son. Ambrose stiffened his leg so, hunched his shoulders and pumped his arms, frowned and bobbed with every step—the very image of the Old Man! Just so, when the highway cleared, he had borne down upon his house as might a gimpy robin on a worm, or his dad upon some youthful miscreant, and Wimpy had laughed instead of giving chase. But the sound went into Ambrose like a blade.
“You are not any such thing!” his mother cried, and hugged him to her breast. “What you call brave, a little criminal like Wimpy James?”
He was ready to defend that notion, but colored Hattie walked in then, snapping gum, to ask what wanted ironing.
“You go on upstairs and put your playclothes on if you’re going down to the Jungle with Peter.”
He was not deaf to the solicitude in his mother’s voice, but lest she fail to appreciate the measure of his despair, he climbed the stairs with heavy foot. However, she had to go straighten Hattie out.
When vanilla-fudge Hattie was in the kitchen, Mother’s afternoon programs went by the board. Hattie had worked for them since a girl, and currently supported three children and a husband who lost her money on the horses. No one knew how much if anything she grasped about his betting, but throughout the afternoons she insisted on the Baltimore station that broadcast results from Bowie and Pimlico, and Ambrose’s mother had not the heart to say no. When a race began Hattie would up-end the electric iron and squint at the refrigerator, snapping ferociously her gum; then she acknowledged each separate return with a hum and a shake of the head.
“Warlord paid four-eighty, three-forty, and two-eighty …”
“Mm hm.”
“Argonaut, four-sixty and three-forty …”
“Mm hm.”
“Sal’s Pride, two-eighty …”
“Mmmm hm!”
After which she resumed her labors and the radio its musical selections until the next race. This music affected Ambrose strongly: it was not at all of a stripe with what they played on Fitch Bandwagon or National Barn Dance; this between races was classical music, as who should say: the sort upper-graders had to listen to in class. Up through the floor of his bedroom came the rumble of tympani and a brooding figure in low strings. Ambrose paused in his dressing to listen, and thinking on his late disgrace frowned: the figure stirred a dark companion in his soul. No man at all! His family, shaken past tears, was in attendance at his graveside.
“I’ll kill that Wimpy,” Peter muttered, and for shame at not having lent his Silver King bike more freely to his late brother, could never bring himself to ride it again.
“Too late,” his father mourned. Was he not reflecting how the dear dead boy had pled for a Senior Erector Set last Christmas, only to receive a Junior Erector Set with neither electric motor nor gearbox?
And outside the press of mourners, grieving privately, was a brown-haired young woman in the uniform of a student nurse: Peggy Robbins from beside Crazy Alice’s house. Gone now the smile wherewith she’d used to greet him on her way to the Nurse’s Home; the gentle voice that answered “How’s my lover today?” when he said hello to her—it was shaken by rough, secret sobs. Too late she saw: what she’d favored him with in jest he had received with adoration. Then and there she pledged never to marry.
But now stern and solemn horns empowered the theme; abject no more, it grew rich, austere. Cymbals struck and sizzled. He was Odysseus steering under anvil clouds like those in Nature’s Secrets. A reedy woodwind warned of hidden peril; on guard, he crept to the closet with the plucking strings.
“Quick!” he hissed to his corduroy knickers inside, who were the undeserving Wimpy. If they could tiptoe from that cave before the lean hounds waked …
“But why are you saving my life?”
“No time for talk, Wimp! Follow me!”
Yet there! The trumpets flashed, low horns roared, and it was slash your way under portcullis and over moat, it was lay about with mace and halberd, bearing up faint Peggy on your left arm while your right cut a swath through the chain-mailed host. And at last, to the thrill of flutes, to the high strings’ tremble, he reached the Auditorium. His own tunic was rent, red; breath came hard; he was more weary than exultant.
“The truth of the matter is,” he declared to the crowd, “I’m just glad I happened to be handy.”
But the two who owed him their lives would not be gainsaid! Before the assembled students and the P.T.A. Wimpy James begged his pardon, while Peggy Robbins—well, she hugged and kissed him there in front of all and whispered something in his ear that made him blush! The multitude rose to applaud, Father and Mother in the forefront, Uncle Karl, Uncle Konrad, and Aunt Rosa beside them; Peter winked at him from the wings, proud as punch. Now brass and strings together played a recessional very nearly too sublime for mortal ears: like the word beyond, it sounded of flight, of vaultin
g aspiration. It rose, it soared, it sang; in the van of his admirers it bore him transfigured from the hall, beyond, beyond East Dorset, aloft to the stars.
For all it was he and not his brother who had suggested the gang’s name, the Occult Order of the Sphinx judged Ambrose too young for membership and forbade his presence at their secret meetings. He was permitted to accompany Peter and the others down to the rivershore and into the Jungle as far as to the Den; he might swing with them on the creepers like Tarzan of the Apes, slide down and scale the rooty banks; but when the Sphinxes had done with playing and convened the Occult Order, Peter would say “You and Perse skeedaddle now,” and he’d have to go along up the beach with Herman Goltz’s little brother from the crabfat-yellow shacks beside the boatyard.
“Come on, pestiferous,” he would sigh then to Perse. But indignifying as it was to be put thus with a brat of seven, who moreover had a sty in his eye and smelled year round like pee and old crackers, at bottom Ambrose approved of their exclusion. Let little kids into your Occult Order: there would go your secrets all over school.
And the secrets were the point of the thing. When Peter had mentioned one evening that he and the fellows were starting a club, Ambrose had tossed the night through in a perfect fever of imagining. It would be a secret club-that went without saying; there must be secret handshakes, secret passwords, secret initiations. But these he felt meant nothing except to remind you of the really important thing, which was—well, hard to find words for, but there had to be the real secrets, dark facts known to none but the members. You had to have been initiated to find them out—that’s what initiation meant—and when you were a member you’d know the truth of the matter and smile in a private way when you met another member of the Order, because you both knew what you knew. All night and for a while after, Ambrose had wondered whether Peter and the fellows could understand that that was the important thing. He ceased to wonder when he began to see just that kind of look on their faces sometimes; certain words and little gestures set them laughing; they absolutely barred outsiders from the Jungle and said nothing to their parents about the Occult Order of the Sphinx. Ambrose was satisfied. To make his own position bearable, he gave Perse to understand that he himself was in on the secrets, was in fact a special kind of initiate whose job was to patrol the beach and make sure that no spies or brats got near the Den.