A Boy's Own Story (9 page)

She was not a pretty girl. She had freckles, big black glasses and ears that kept poking their tips out through limp hanks of straight hair. She was something of a tomboy, not by being athletic (she was as afraid of sports as I) but by being straightforward, hearty, confiding. I prized her companionship and liked it when she told me to brush my teeth or flush the toilet. She liked to bathe with me but, I am pleased to say, never undressed to do so.

And yet I didn't really like my imaginary friends precisely because they were so irritatingly vague and unreal. My mother went to great lengths to respect my whim—in fact, she may have known how to deal with my imaginary playmates better than with some of my other more disturbing vagaries. And I might have held on to these friends longer than need be precisely because they earned me a certain deference. A place was laid at the table for Cottage Cheese and my parents inquired after her often. But the imaginary friends were almost, at times, less real to me than to my indulgent mother—the imagination is not the consolation people pretend. It can even be regarded as the admission of some sort of failure.

And yet on my third birthday a professional marionette troupe performed
Sleeping Beauty
in our living room before an audience of my mother's lady friends' children, imported for the occasion. The plates from which we kids had eaten cake and vanilla ice cream were collected and the curtains drawn, creating night in day, a magic trick I associated only with afternoon naps. It was a warm, sniffling, giggling audience. A little raised stage framed in blue cloth had been erected at one end of the room. The toe of a big brown shoe protruding from beneath the hem of the proscenium draperies kept in mind real dimensions only for a few more minutes; soon the reduced scale of the stage had engulfed me, as though I'd been precipitated through a beaker and sublimated into another substance altogether. I had never heard the story before. The curse of Carabosse, the Princess's mishap in the Rose Garden, her long sleep and the funny, frozen postures of the courtiers, the arrival of the Prince and the joyous nuptials all transported me to a world of boldly modeled faces from which character could be readily deduced, a world in which menace foreshadowed disaster, evil was defeated and love crowned. In this lighted cube my emotions coalesced because they were given a firm bounding line and because things devolved with the logic of art, not life.

For if the imaginary playmates were insubstantial, the overly material people who surrounded me were opaque. Now only these miniature figures—with a hooked nose punctuated by a wart, a skein of lustrous blond hair, lace cuffs, velvet trains—only they seemed lit from within and legible as they floated up out of the bottomless floor, gestured wildly, gazed as though blind in only the general direction of an interlocutor, shook with tearless sobs, growled or piped, then flew at one another for hearty, back-slapping embraces until they were whipped up into the wings.
That
was the secret of the imagination—its creations were feeble only to the maker but stronger than life itself to the observer. When the curtains were opened again and the puppeteers—balding husband and bespectacled wife—emerged with shy grins and joined the party, a deep sadness sounded inside me.

When I was seven my mother divorced my father. My sister and I, aroused by the declamatory tone of the grownups downstairs, sat in pajamas on the front stairs and listened to the speeches. How odd and thrilling that where we'd live and go to school could be decided in this manner. My father, my mother and the woman who'd eventually be my stepmother took turns giving speeches, although my father was mostly silent unless prodded into murmurs by the women. My mother was saying, "If she is the one you really want, then far be it from me to stand in the way of your happiness, yet if I might speak in my own behalf..." The complex sentences with their unfamiliar locutions sometimes tripped my mother up, as though she were a debutante in her first long dress.

Everything about the conference seemed dramatic—the late hour, the formal tone, even the notion that something momentous could or should be decided all at once. Soon my sister and I, sitting in the bleachers of the dark stairwell and peering down into the brightness, had sworn our own complicity by dissembling: both of us were excited by the prospect of living in a new city and shedding our difficult father, but we both pretended to be grief-struck.

The real excitement, of course, lay in learning that a life could be changed and that one could enter a brand-new, better world ("I shall move wherever the children will have the cultural and educational advantages of a major metropolis," our mother was saying). That a life could be changed posited the still more thrilling notion that one had a thing called a
life,
a wonderful being that was growing silently inside like an infant. How its body would be formed and what its temperament would be like would surely remain unknown—along with the color of its eyes, the cubits of its height and the beauty of its face—up to the moment of birth. Until I heard the three adults discussing their lives and our lives ("I cannot lead my life in this way," "The children have their whole lives before them") I had never suspected that I'd been impregnated with this "life," this tragic embryo. The divorce, for me, was primarily an accession into self-consciousness.

It was also a deliverance from my father. Since he slept all day, 1 seldom saw him. But sometimes my mother would say, "Your father's awake. Why don't you go in and rub his back?" Reluctantly I'd enter the bedroom, in which the drawn curtains stained the late afternoon light. On the bed, face down, lay my naked father under sheets, like a sea monster beached and sick in a tide pool of foam. The mingled smells of night sweat and stale cigar smoke awed me; I toddled out and told my mother he was still sleeping. "No, no," she said, smiling and guiding me back in. I looked around the room from which I was usually barred. Everything was silent except for his breathing and the tick of his gold pocket watch on the night table beside him. Within my father's half-closed closet I could see his shoes. I intuited one shoe from no more than a single burning vertical line of light that followed me by traveling glassily across the black leather rondure above the heel. Floating up there, high above the shoes, hung a smoky cashmere Olympus of all his discarded but potential selves: his suits. Now to the bed.

I sat beside him and lightly patted his back. He murmured encouragingly and I worked my way up the thickly padded torso to the shoulders. The pores looked huge, some of them specked with black. A film of sweat seemed to be methodically seeping out of him; I sniffed my right hand; it smelled funny. My job seemed to be to creep over him as a lone climber, with nothing but rope and crampons, might assault a glacier. If he was fully awake he didn't let on, as though a state of torpor were all a father owed a very little son—or at least all the son would accept from such a massive father.

He was entirely naked but shrouded up to the waist in sheets. Whereas my sheets were small, sufficient for my cot where I slept in the governing shade and disturbingly intimate smell of my black nurse, these sheets were sculpturally white, vast and twisted, testimony to adult nights of passion or strife.

Later, an hour later, he'd descend to his squire's breakfast, shaved and dressed in a white shirt, silk tie and double-breasted suit, his eyes young, sharp and intelligent in a head I'd seen earlier from an odd, wounded angle. He was now polite to the cook, deferential to my mother and lighthearted and cutting with my sister and me—he who'd been nothing but a felled deity exuding a cold sweat an hour before. This transformation of the mystery man in the tangle of sheets into the bantering gentleman I attributed to the rites of the bathroom mirror and the bracing smell of carbolic soap and witch hazel. How he'd study himself in that mirror, both taps running full blast, as though out of the haze on the glass his true identity might emerge under a swipe of the towel—a cutting of the self if not the full blossoming branch.

Dad had a friend of sorts—to him possibly a very minor business associate—whom my sister and I worshipped because he gave us money. "Dollar Bill," we called him, since he was William and always gave us a dollar each. Though we wanted for nothing and we dimly sensed that our way of living cost many, many dollars, this unseen cash meant nothing to us compared to the actual loot Dollar Bill handed over. If the Devil or Hitler had offered us even a single dollar for our parents' heads, we would have cut them off and presented the bloody, bulky packages in happy exchange. How greedy we were, we who'd learned so early the value and sinister glory of the dollar. How we'd fawn on Dollar Bill, hugging his legs and kissing his neck. How we'd squeal with excitement when we spied him coming down the walk. The grown-ups would guffaw in chorus over our gold-digging antics, pleased to see us miming their own sentiments—much as one might be pleased to see chimps mounting or presenting in inflated purple imitation a human desire less colorful but no less persistent.

In a sense all of our daddy's dollars were casters on which the furniture of our lives glided noiselessly; every dollar was assigned a function and kept out of sight. Dollar Bill, however, liberated two dollars a week from invisible utility. We loved him more than anyone we knew.

Once my mother became so exasperated with me that she asked my father to beat me with a strap. He marched me into his bedroom; the bed was now neatly covered by a fitted pale yellow satin spread, an antique mirror so shiny it reflected lights and shadows if not coherent figures. "Drop your pants," my father said. I had already started a sort of gasping, an asthmatic gasping, in anticipation of a pain that seemed impossibly cruel because I had no idea when it would descend on me nor how long it would last. My lack of control over the situation was for me the worst punishment, and I gasped and gasped for air and escape and justice, or at least mercy. Panic lit up everywhere within me; I longed to run or disappear in a burst of chemical smoke and reappear as a white, frightened animal from under a top hat, gently nibbling at the fumes. I thought I could win my father over; I said with sullen candor (I had nothing but candor to work with), "I'll never do it again. I'm sorry."

But he was angry now. His hate, more intense than any other feeling he'd ever had for me, was making his face younger and younger. His eyes no longer had that veiled, compounded look of adults who stare at blank spots on walls or get tangled up in the tulle of thought. Now his eyes were simple and curious, eyes I recognized as those of another child. A scream caught up with me and outraced me. I felt myself inhabited by this scream that was registered in a voice bigger, more released than anything I had ever heard—a scream that seemed even bigger than my fear. It took me over and wouldn't stop. It was a cry of outrage against a violation at the hands of a child no older than I but much less appeasable—a heartless boy.

He tugged my pants down and pushed me forward into the glossy spread. The belt fell again and again, much too long and much too harshly to my mind, which had suddenly turned strangely epicurean. The solace of the condemned is scorn, especially scorn of an aesthetic stripe. In that moment the vital energies retreated out of my body into a small, hard gland of bitter objectivity, a gland that would secrete its poison through me for the rest of my life. At last my mother, conveniently tardy, rushed in and asked for mercy; she even had the satisfaction of accusing my father of being unduly harsh.

While the divorce was still pending and the school year still in session, our mother moved my sister and me to a hotel in a community that had been built to resemble a Tudor village, all half-timbered stucco. That entire spring it seemed to rain. Every day after school I went walking for hours through unknown streets that were nearly empty. The intense, pure colors of traffic signals burned through the rain and cast long edible smears on the wet pavement. Green, yellow, red. A click in the box. Then red, yellow, green. I found a church, ivied and squat, with rounded arches and murky painted windows and, inside, the smell of floor polish. I walked down the resonant deserted aisles and came upon a carved wood door behind and to one side of the altar. A sign indicated that this was the minister's office. I knocked on the door. A pleasant man in a dark business suit opened it. "Yes?"

"Are you the minister?"

"Yes."

"Do you mind if I talk to you? I have a problem."

"That's what I'm here for. Come in."

The office seemed efficient with its typewriters and files and fluorescent ceiling lamps and water cooler; it struck a reassuringly practical note of business. He indicated I should sit in a green leather chair. He then sat down and faced me across the desk.

"Are you busy?"

"No. I have a few minutes. What's the problem?"

"My parents are getting divorced."

"Does that disturb you?"

"Yes. Well, maybe."

"Are you going to live with your mother?"

"Yes."

"Would you rather live with your father?"

"No."

"Do you dislike your father?"

"Goodness no."

"Would you like to see your parents stay married?"

The sympathy in his eyes caused me to say, "Yes." Once I had, I realized that this single lie had made me into a character in a story—just like one of the marionettes. "I want them to—yes." I felt my face become more beautiful, I hoped the minister would invite me to his house and take care of me, or at least tell my mother how wonderful I was. I hoped the minister would tell his congregation about the wonderful little boy who had visited him one rainy afternoon. "Is there anything I can do? To bring them back together?" I asked.

"Probably not. You can pray for them, for both of them to make the best possible decision."

I lowered my eyes but thought prayer sounded rather useless. I stood and thanked him. He walked me to the door and told me to come back. I wondered if he would pick me up into his arms, but he didn't. I was small enough, but he didn't. Instead he gave me his hand to shake, which I didn't really like since I was uncertain about how to shake it. The gesture was also, I recognized, a way of treating me with respect as an independent young man. I wasn't sure that was what I wanted to be.