Those green pipes and sheets of metal are the true center of my childhood trip to the family home.
42.3. I look for vivid, synthetic memories involving both my parents, but they come slowly, merging with general impressions.
In June when I was seven, my mom and dad were to bring my sister and me over from Hopewell Junction to Poughkeepsie for Barbara’s graduation from Vassar. As we got ready to go, there was some problem with my mother’s dress—she hadn’t packed the one she thought she had—and around my father was the rising anxiety and irritability that always preceded any trip into a large group of strangers.
My memories of the Summer Institute the previous year were vivid. But a seven-year-old’s perceptions are very different from a six-year-old’s. When we drove onto the Vassar campus, I was sure I would know my way around the grounds and woods the way I knew the grounds around our summer home at Hopewell. But as I got out of the car—my father was still arguing with my mother about something—it was all unfamiliar.
The six-year-old’s memories were of immediacies, textures, brilliant close-ups. But the seven-year-old took in an entire comprehensible geography of buildings, lawns, paths, among which I could place none of the images from the summer before. “Margaret, I am not going to …” came from the other side of the car, at which point I saw Barbara and her father, my Uncle Myles. I ran up to them. Could they take me to see the old mailboxes—and Barbara said, yes, she knew which dorm building my mother had stayed in the previous year.
Yes, I certainly wanted to confirm that my memories were right. But I also wanted to get away from my parents’ bickering. It took us a while to get there—by now Barbara and Aunt Dorothy had me with them. The distress I felt pushed me to the edge of tears, for last summer’s ancient and inefficient postal structure had been removed and a new wall plastered over it!
But Grandma and Grampa were there with Uncle Myles and Aunt Dorothy. Aunt Virginia and Uncle Lenny had also come up, bringing Boyd and Dorothy; in the back of their car they had Dorothy’s old red child-sized two-wheeler, which had been promised me for months and months, but which till now had not been delivered.
For an hour or two, my sister and I were left in the care of my grandparents and other relatives. Boyd and Uncle Lenny got out the bike, and there on the flags of the Vassar Campus, now under Grampa’s tutelage, now under Boyd’s, and now under my father’s—he came over for a while to run behind me and hold the wobbling seat as I pedaled along the uneven flags—I learned to ride the rickety red bicycle.
Later, somehow, whatever had angered my father flared up again; he drove off the campus and went home, refusing to stay for the ceremony (“What happened to Uncle Sam?” Barbara asked, already in her cap and gown. “Oh, he had to go, dear”)—yes, Lenny and Virginia would drive Mother and us kids back to Hopewell Junction later. Finally we were all in our folding chairs out in the grass. Because of some seating problem, my mother, in whatever inadequate-in-her-own-eyes dress, had to sit with the board of trustees, in full view, up on the platform. Beside me Grandma quickly and quietly dug out some crackers for my nine-year-old cousin, Dorothy, who had developed a sudden hunger, while on the platform before us, between the banks of flowers, the women students (which, that year, included one Jacqueline Bouvier, who’d been in a French class with my cousin), the chorus with its white hats and white dresses blowing about and the graduates in their black robes and board-topped hats stood, trying not to giggle, while I thought of nothing but cycling through the wind, through the sky, through space itself to the stars. …
42.4. As a child I had an imaginary friend, Octopus. Initially I loved the word for its sound, as I loved my friend. We played together, told each other secrets, stories, and planned our days and lives together. Octopus was, however, often a trial to my elders. I never did anything wrong; it was always Octopus who had done it. I didn’t want the extra ice cream after dessert was over; it was for Octopus. If I went someplace I wasn’t supposed to, it was because Octopus had gone before me and I’d had to get him and bring him back.
At my Aunt Virginia’s house in Montclair, we were sitting in the glorious sunny kitchen one day—a kitchen with steps that went down to the square wooden milk door in the yellow wall, where, in his white coat, the milkman left bottles of milk in the zinc-walled chamber with ovoid bulbs at their tops in which the ivory cream collected, a kitchen to which my cousin Dorothy returned for tomato soup and a tuna fish sandwich during her lunch period from school on weekdays, a kitchen in which steps went down to the basement that held my cousin Boyd’s extensive electric-train layout and where Dorothy taught me the rumba and the mambo, a kitchen where you went through a small door and up the steps two flights to the third-floor attic that housed Boyd’s bedroom and the pool table and a toy chest that held old magic kits and chemistry sets and roulette wheels and mechanical racing horses and board games like Mr. Ree and Clue and Parcheesi and Monopoly—in short, it was a marvelous kitchen.
My father was there that morning.
And I must have refused to do one thing too many, asked for one thing too much—because of Octopus.
My father flew into a fit.
“Octopus? Octopus? Here, there’s Octopus—right? Right? There he is!” He stood up angrily from the kitchen table in his tie and shirtsleeves, then grabbed at the air in front of me. “Well, I’ve got Octopus now! And he’s going right in the garbage. That’s enough of this! This is ridiculous. There’s Octopus. …” Holding his fist out at arm’s length, my father marched across the kitchen to the garbage pail, stepped on the treadle: the shiny aluminum lid flew up, glaring in the sun.
I screeched, “No …!”
My father flung his fist down toward the paper bag inside, filled with orange peels and coffee grounds from breakfast, and then pushed the few balled-up newspapers down farther into the bag. “There’s Octopus! Right in there, now! He’s dead! He’s all gone! I’ve killed him and thrown him in the garbage pail—and you’ll never see him again!” He knocked the lid closed, loudly. “Now that’s enough, you hear!”
He walked back to the table, sat down again, put both hands around his coffee cup, and said, “Jesus Christ …!”
At the sink my Aunt Virginia said, “Oh, Sam.…”
My mother at the other side of the table just sat and said nothing.
Crying, I looked from the garbage can to my father to the garbage can again.
“Don’t you ‘Oh, Sam’ me, Virginia. And don’t you go coddling him, either,” my father said. “Enough is enough! He’s got to learn.”
And Octopus was dead.
I was never able to call him up again, though I tried over and over for the next half dozen days. But a year later, in the first grade, it was Wolverine who, during my nap time, I told myself endless stories about now, to shut out the sound of the teacher, reading at the end of the gym, where we rested, from Mr. Popper’s Penguins.
42.5. On and off, all through elementary school, my best friend was a boy named Geoff. Geoff was taller and stronger and friendlier than I, and his father produced wondrous shows in that new medium growing more and more popular throughout the country—television. (In a year my own family would buy one.) Geoff was a big, bright, affable boy.
One day, under the influence of a wonderful production of Peter Pan, with Jean Arthur, that my parents had taken me to see on Broadway, I convinced Geoff that we should run away like the Lost Boys in the show. Dissatisfaction with our current state of affairs had nothing to do with it. But, like the boys in Peter Pan, we would “get lost” purely for the sake of “adventuring.” Precisely what sort of adventure would it be?
Well, unless we ran away to find it, I explained to Geoff, we’d never know.
It was a sunny day. Our athletics class always went to Central Park on such days to one or another of the various playing fields. Lagging behind at the end of the line, Geoff and I waited for our chance, ducked off from the group, and spent a pleasant hour or so wandering about in the park on ou
r own. After two hours, Geoff grew bored and went off to find a policeman to take him back to school. I lasted another hour, then came out onto tree-lined Fifth Avenue. In my case, a policeman found me and walked me back to the ten-story school building on Eighty-ninth Street, where I was brought to the staunchly disapproving headmistress’s office and, at her desk, under her stern eyes, was allowed to eat a baloney sandwich served on a white plate with a white cloth napkin and that, for some reason, had had the crusts trimmed. And I drank a glass of milk. Geoff and I were both in serious trouble—we were suspended for three days.
When we came back to classes, the first-grade teacher, a usually friendly and attractive black woman—one of the very few black teachers in the school—gave a lecture to the whole class on the moral harm of following our friends into trouble. It was bad enough, she explained, to decide to do something wrong. But it was much worse, she admonished, when somebody else decided to do something wrong and you went along with it. That showed spinelessness as well as moral laxity and could not be tolerated at all.
Rest hour was right after lunch in the tenth-floor gym. With our mats spread out, the whole class spent the first half hour supposedly sleeping—or, at any rate, being quiet so others could sleep. For the second half, our teacher read to us from one or another grade-school classic, Miss Kelly the Cat or Freddy the Pig.
Anyone interrupting the reading was sent out into the hall. The gym filled up the whole tenth floor; and there were two halls, actually, one at either end. The first miscreant was sent out into one. If there was a second, he or she would be sent out into the other—which usually took care of the half-hour.
“Geoff,” I said at lunch, “I got an idea. Today, what we’ll do is this. At rest, we won’t even put our mats down anywhere near each other. Then, in the second half, when she starts reading, you do something to get yourself sent out. A minute or two later, I’ll get sent out on the other side. Now, you stay where you are; I’ll go down to the ninth floor, go across, and come up on your side. Then we can sit on the steps and talk—if we don’t make too much noise.”
Geoff gave a big grin. “Okay!” Geoff may have been the follower in our several joint mischiefs, but he was an enthusiastic follower, and not a spineless one at all, which, in my eyes, exempted him from our teacher’s morning homily.
The plan, as far as I could see, worked very well. Geoff was sent out into the East Hall. Moments later I was asked, if I could not keep quiet when the others wanted to hear, to go out into the West Hall, which I did—and hurried down the steps onto the ninth floor and across to come up the East Stair, where Geoff was leaning against the banister, waiting.
We sat down together on the steps, to discuss our math homework and Batman and who was going to—
Both of us were seized by our shoulders, yanked to our feet, and tugged up to the landing, while we looked up into the dark—and angry—face of our teacher. “All right,” she said, “now whose idea was this? Which of you is the leader, and which of you is the follower?”
I’d always thought that in such tight corners, friends simply kept mum, pleaded childish ignorance, suggested co-conspiracies, and tried to look like creatures incapable of anything so clear-minded as a plan.
But Geoff said, clearly, boldly, and without hesitation, “It was my idea. He was following me.”
I was stunned.
The teacher thrust Geoff back toward the door to the gym. “All right,” she said, “you go back inside. And you come with me.” And, as a spineless follower, I was marched off to the more severe punishment.
What had stunned me was twofold: first, I had been stunned to find that friends could blatantly lie for their own ends. And second, I’d been stunned that an authoritative adult could hear such a lie and not know it immediately for what it was—for I’d always been told, “We know when you’re not telling the truth,” and till then I’d believed it.
42.6. Those moments when we learn that mothers rage and fathers kill, that friends betray and authority is fallible, or that our own blank, innocent ignorance can destroy the pure, the good, and the loved are moments the very memory of which constitutes the beginning of a strategy to live in a world where such horrors exist.
That the two columns must be the Marxist and the Freudian—the material column and the column of desire—is only a modernist prejudice. The autonomy of each is subverted by the same excesses, just as severely.
Consider two accounts of a life.
They seem as if they take place on different planets.
Yet the narrator, through all that surrounds them both, insists the parallel columns write of one person—even more, insists that the gap between them, the split, the nickering correlations between, as evanescent as light-shot water, as insubstantial as moonstruck cloud, are really all that constitutes the subject: not the content, if you will, but the relationships that can be drawn out of that content, and which finally that content can be analyzed down into.
We resist. (In the hospital, mulling all these memories over, I certainly resisted.) Certainly one must be the lie that is illuminated by the other’s truth …?
But read them carefully. Neither is pure. Both suffer their anacolutha, their parataxes, their syllepses, their catachreses, the rhetoric which joins each to an excess that, if it begin in the reader’s eye as supplemental, under closer examination is ultimately revealed as constitutive, a rhetoric that joins each—however tenuously—to the other.
42.7. A black man …? A gay man …?
A writer …?
42.71. Certainly the aspect of writing that was most problematic was the one for which Marilyn had only given me a word months before. But with that word—”dyslexia”—how quickly I’d been able to construct a history for it.
The first person I remember pointing out something was wrong was Barbara. I was five and had just gotten my first pair of glasses. A slight wandering of my right eye had been spotted by the ophthalmologist: apparently the ability I had to relax the muscles of my eyes and forehead in such a way that every car, lamppost, window, and dark brown lady in a sun hat, moving forward or away on the summer sidewalk, would split into two layers, one sliding off to the left of the other, was a weakness! By examining the myriad minuscule discrepancies and displacements between the two images, I had already figured out most of the mechanism of depth and parallax. In the same way, I could bring stereoptical pictures together, making them rise up into dimensionality without using a viewer. I could take any comic book page, any book illustration, any column of print—even without knowing what it said—and double it. But, while the fogging glare from the belladonna drops that had enlarged my pupils slowly wore off, the balding brown doctor assured my mother that if I did certain eye exercises daily, my “weakness” would vanish—and, presumably, with it my wonderful ability.
I was not very enthusiastic about the exercises, though fortunately the doctor had lied: I can still do it—have been doing it all my life, as the running metaphor of this book attests.
That summer, my mother was to take me and my three-year-old sister to Sag Harbor on Long Island, where we would share a summer cottage near the beach with some family friends, Charlie and Jeanette, and their two children, Jan (my age), and Little Charlie (three or four years older than I). Barbara, at sixteen, was along to babysit. My father would drive us down but come right back to the city … because of work.
My sister and I sat in the back seat of the stifling car. My father and Barbara stood outside, waiting for my mother. While I sat, I turned and, with my forefinger, wrote my name on the inside of the car window: SAMUEL. Outside, Barbara glanced at what I was doing, then frowned. “Uncle Sam, look at that!” She was always a bright and impetuous girl.
Carrying the black picnic hamper, Mother came out of the funeral parlor door toward the curb.
“What about it?” my mother asked.
“It’s backwards!” Barbara said.
“No, it’s not,” my father said.
“But he
’s inside the car,” Barbara said. “It should be backwards. I mean, out here. But it isn’t. That means he wrote it backwards inside.” She motioned for me to roll down the window.
I did.
Air entered the Nash’s tan plush interior. “Where did you learn to do that?” Barbara asked. “Can you write backwards …?” I just grinned. I wasn’t really sure what she meant by writing backwards. I’d always been confused by the notion that writing and reading were only supposed to proceed in one direction.
“That’s just because he’s left-handed,” my mother said; my father took the picnic hamper from her.
“And we’re changing that,” my father said, carrying it to the driver’s door. “Come on, get in. Let’s get going!”
“I don’t know if that’s right …” Barbara said, coming around to get in beside us. “I think now people are saying you’re not supposed to change them. Can you do that again?” she asked me.
I lifted my other hand, and began to finger over the window again: SA …
“This time it’s forward!” Barbara declared, as the car started.
“Don’t let him do that,” my father said. “The window’s dirty enough as it is!”
And we drove on out to the Long Island beach, where, in that small red house up on its stilts, for the first time I went through the ignominy of running around on the porch for fifteen minutes, looking for my misplaced glasses, till someone said, “You’ve got them on, silly!” and at the beachside stand, in my bathing suit, sand to the knees, I shook vinegar over the paper cone full of fried clams, and back at the house Jeanette’s aunt, with a red-and-green scarf wound around her head, at the back table, read my mother’s tea leaves, first turning the cup, after the tea had been drunk, inverted on its saucer, around three times, then lifting it back up—and read of a house with a picket fence (“Now that must be Hopewell Junction,” Jeanette blurted, and Barbara said, “Shhh.… Don’t say anything!”) and of a great affair that my mother did not want to go to (“Now that’s got to be your Labor Day barbecue,” Jeanette laughed. “You know how you’re always saying you’re not going to do it again next year; but then you always do!” “Oh Jeanette!” Barbara cried, practically beside herself. “Look, I want to see if she can read mine! She doesn’t know me at all!”)—and I stood at my mother’s shoulder, looking into the sloping porcelain, where the long, black leaves, crisscrossed, clung to the wet white surface: they were certainly no less clear than the letters on the pages I’d had so much trouble with in school.