Moon Palace (33 page)

“That’s all copy. I never knew my father, and my mother has been dead for years.”

“Yes, I heard about it not long after it happened. A traffic accident of some kind, I believe. A terrible tragedy. It must have been awful for you.”

“She was run over by a bus in Boston. I was just a little boy at the time.”

“A terrible tragedy,” Barber repeated, closing his eyes once again. “She was a beautiful and intelligent girl, your mother. I remember her well.”

T
en months later, when Barber lay dying in a Chicago hospital with a broken back, he told me that he had begun to suspect the truth as early as that first conversation in the hotel lobby. The only reason he didn’t come out with it then was that he thought it would fcopyen me off. He didn’t know me yet, and it was impossible for him to predict how I would respond to such sudden, cataclysmic news. He had only to imagine the scene to understand the importance of holding his tongue. A 350-pound stranger invites me to a hotel, shakes my hand, and then, rather than talk about the things I have come to discuss, looks me in the eye and tells me that he is my long-lost father. No matter how strong the temptation, it just wouldn’t wash. In all likelihood, I would think he was a madman and refuse to talk to him again. Since there would be plenty of time for us to get to know each other, he didn’t want to destroy his chances by provoking a scene at the wrong moment. As with so many of the things in the story I am trying to tell, this turned out to be a mistake. Contrary to what Barber had imagined, there was not much time at all. He trusted in the future to resolve the problem, but then that future never came to pass. That was hardly his fault, but he paid for it nevertheless, as I paid for it along with him. In spite of the results, I don’t see how he could have acted any differently. No one could have known
what would happen; no one could have guessed the dark and terrible things that lay in store for us.

Even now, I cannot think of Barber without being overwhelmed by pity. If I had never known who my father was, at least I knew that a father had once existed. A child must come from somewhere, after all, and the man who engenders that child is willy-nilly called a father. Barber, on the other hand, knew nothing. He had slept with my mother only once (on a damp, starless night in the spring of 1946), and by the next day she was gone, disappearing from his life for good. He did not know that she had become pregnant, did not know that he had a son, did not know the first thing about what he had accomplished. Given the disaster that followed, it seems only fair that he should have received something for his pains, even if only the knowledge of what he had done. The charwoman had walked in early that morning without knocking, and because she could not suppress the shriek that came rushing from her throat, the entire population of the boardinghouse was inside the room before they had a chance to put on their clothes. If it had just been the charwoman, they might have been able to invent a story, perhaps even have wriggled out of it, but as it was, there were too many witnesses against them. A nineteen-year-old freshman in bed with her history professor. There were rules against that kind of thing, and only a dolt would be clumsy enough to get caught, especially in a place like Oldburn, Ohio. He was dismissed, Emily ran back to Chicago, and that was the end of it. His career never rebounded from the setback, but even worse was the torment of losing Emily. It clung to him for the rest of his life, and not a month went by (as he put it to me in the hospital) when he did not relive the cruelty of her rejection, the look of absolute horror on her face when he asked her to marry him. “You’ve destroyed me,” she said, “and I’ll be damned if I ever let you see me again.” As it turned out, he never did. By the time he managed to track her down thirteen years later, she was already lying in her grave.

From all that I can gather, my mother never spoke to anyone
about what had happened. Her parents were both dead, and with Victor traveling around the country with the Cleveland Orchestra, there was nothing that obliged her to mention the scandal. For all intents and purposes, she was just another college dropout, and for a young woman in 1946, that could not have been considered very alarming. The mystery was that even after she learned she was pregnant, she refused to divulge the name of the father. I asked my uncle about it several times during the years we lived together, but he was just as much in the dark as I was. “It was Emily’s secret,” he said. “I pressed her about it more often than I’d like to remember, but she never even gave me a hint.” To give birth to an illegitimate child back in those days was a brave and stubborn thing to do, but apparently my mother never hesitated. Along with everything else, I have that to thank her for. A less willful woman would have given me up for adoption—or, even worse, have arranged to have an abortion. It is not a very pleasant thought, but if my mother hadn’t been who she was, I might not have made it into the world. If she had done the sensible thing, I would have been dead before I was ever born, a three-month-old fetus lying at the bottom of some garbage can in a back alley.

In spite of his grief, my mother’s rejection did not really surprise Barber, and as the years went by, he found it difficult to hold it against her. The wonder was that she had been attracted to him in the first place. He was already twenty-nine in the spring of 1946, and the fact was that Emily was the first woman who had gone to bed with him without being paid for it. Nor had those transactions been anything but few and far between. The risk was simply too great, and once he learned that pleasure could be killed by humiliation, he seldom dared to try. Barber had no illusions about himself. He understood what people saw when they looked at him, and he knew that they were copy to feel what they did. Emily had been his one chance, and he had lost her. Hard as it was to accept, he could not help feeling that this was exactly what he deserved.

His body was a dungeon, and he had been condemned to serve out the rest of his days in it, a forgotten prisoner with no recourse to appeals, no hope for a reduced sentence, no chance for a swift and merciful execution. He had reached his full adult height by the time he was fifteen, somewhere between six-two and six-three, and from then on his weight kept mounting. He struggled through his adolescence to keep it below 250, but his late-night binges did not help, nor did diets seem to have any effect. He shrank from mirrors and spent as much time alone as he could. The world was an obstacle course of staring eyes and pointing fingers, and he was an ambulatory freak show, the balloon boy who waddled through gauntlets of laughter and stopped people dead in their tracks. Books became a refuge for him early on, a place where he could keep himself hidden—not only from others, but from his own thoughts as well. For Barber was never in doubt as to who should be blamed for the way he looked. By entering the words that stood before him on the page, he was able to forget his body, and that, more than anything else, helped to put his self-recriminations in abeyance. Books gave him the chance to float, to suspend his being in his mind, and as long as he paid complete attention to them, he could delude himself into thinking that he had been cut free, that the ropes that tied him to his grotesque moorings had been snapped.

He graduated first in his high school class, compiling grades and test scores that astonished everyone in the little town of Shoreham, Long Island. In June of that year he delivered a heartfelt if rambling valedictory in defense of the pacifist movement, the Spanish republic, and a second term for Roosevelt. It was 1936, and the audience in the hot gymnasium clapped loudly for him at the end, even if it did not support his politics. Then, as his unwitting son would do twenty-nine years later, he set off for New York and four years of Columbia College. By the end of that time, he had fixed his weight barrier at 290. Graduate school in history followed, accompanied by a rejection from the army when he tried to enlist. “No fatties allowed,” the sergeant said with a
contemptuous smirk. Barber therefore joined the ranks of the home front, staying behind with the paraplegics and mental incompetents, the too young and the too old. He spent those years in the history department at Columbia surrounded by women, an anomalous hulk of male flesh brooding in the library stacks. But no one denied that he was good at what he did. His thesis on Bishop Berkeley and the Indians won the American Studies Award for 1944, and afterward he was offered positions in a number of Eastern universities. For reasons he could never quite fathom, he opted for Ohio.

The first year went well enough. He turned out to be a popular teacher, joined the faculty chorus as a baritone, and wrote the first three chapters of a book on Indian captivity narratives. The war in Europe finally ended that spring, and when the two bombs were dropped on Japan in August, he tried to console himself with the thought that it could not happen again. Against all odds, the next year began brilliantly. Between September and January he worked his weight down to three hundred pounds, and for the first time in his life he began to look to the future with some optimism. The spring semester brought Emily Fogg into his freshman history class, a charming, effervescent girl who unexpectedly became smitten with him. It was too good to be true, and although he did his best to proceed with caution, it gradually became clear to him that all things were suddenly possible, even the thing he had never dared to imagine before. Then came the boardinghouse, the charwoman bursting into the room, the disaster. The sheer speed of it paralyzed him, left him too stunned to react. When he was called into the president’s office later that day, the idea of protesting his dismissal did not even occur to him. He returned to his room, packed his bags, and left without saying good-bye to anyone.

The night train took him to Cleveland, where he checked into a room at the YMCA. His first plan was to throw himself out the window, but after three days of waiting for the copy moment, he realized that he lacked the nerve. After that, he made up his mind
to give in, to abandon the struggle once and for all. If he did not have the courage to die, he said to himself, then at least he was going to live as a free man. That much was certain. He was no longer going to cringe from himself; he was no longer going to let others determine who he was. For the next four months, he ate his way to the brink of oblivion, gorging himself on cream puffs and doughnuts, on buttery potatoes and gravy-drenched roasts, on pancakes, fried chickens, and hefty bowls of chowder. By the time his rampage was done, he had put on thirty-seven new pounds—but the numbers were no longer important. He had stopped looking at them, and therefore they had ceased to exist.

The larger his body grew, the more deeply he buried himself inside it. Barber’s goal was to shut himself off from the world, to make himself invisible in the massiveness of his own flesh. He spent those months in Cleveland learning how to ignore what strangers thought of him, immunizing himself against the pain of being seen. Every morning, he would test himself by walking down Euclid Avenue at rush hour, and on Saturdays and Sundays he made a point of frittering away the afternoon in Weye Park, exposing himself to as many people as possible, pretending not to hear what the gawkers said, willing their glances to bounce off of him. He was alone now, entirely separate from everyone: a bulbous, egg-shaped monad plodding through the shambles of his consciousness. But the work had paid off, and he no longer feared this isolation. By plunging into the chaos that inhabited him, he had become Solomon Barber at last, a personage, a someone, a self-created world unto himself.

The crowning touch came several years later, when Barber began losing his hair. At first it seemed like a bad pun—a bald man named Barber—but since wigs and toupees were out of the question, he had no choice but to live with it. The beautiful garden on his head gradually withered away. Where thickets of reddish-brown curls had once grown, there was now only blank scalp, a barren expanse of naked skin. He did not like this change in his appearance, but even more disturbing was the fact that it was so
thoroughly beyond his control. It pushed him into a passive relation with himself, and that was precisely what he could no longer tolerate. One day, therefore, when the process was about half complete (hair on either side but none on top), he calmly picked up a razor and shaved off what was left. The result of this experiment was far more impressive than he would have thought. He possessed a great stone of a head, Barber found, a mythological head, and as he stood there looking at himself in the mirror, it seemed copy to him that the vast globe of his body should now have a moon to go with it. From that day on, he treated this orb with scrupulous care, rubbing creams and oils into it every morning to maintain the proper sheen and smoothness, pampering it with electric massages, making sure that it was always well protected from the elements. He began wearing hats, all sorts of hats, and little by little they became the badge of his eccentricity, the ultimate sign of who he was. He was no longer just the obese Solomon Barber, he was the Man Who Wore Hats. It took a certain daring to do what he did, but by then he had learned to take pleasure in cultivating his oddness, acquiring a motley paraphernalia along the way that only enhanced his talent for perplexing others. He wore bowlers and fezes, baseball caps and fedoras, pith helmets and cowboy hats, whatever captured his fancy, without regard to style or convention. By 1957, his collection had grown so large that he once went twenty-three days without wearing the same hat twice.

After the Ohio crucifixion (as he later referred to it), Barber found work at a variety of small, undistinguished colleges in the Midwest and West. What at first he thought would be a temporary exile stretched on for more than twenty years, and by the time it was over the map of his wounds was circumscribed by points in every corner of the heartland: Indiana and Texas, Nebraska and Oklahoma, South Dakota and Kansas, Idaho and Minnesota. He never stayed anywhere for more than two or three years, and while the schools all tended to be alike, the constant movement kept him from being bored. Barber had a great capacity for work,
and in the dusty calm of those retreats he rarely did anything else, steadily producing articles and books, attending conferences and delivering lectures, devoting such long hours to his students and courses that he never failed to emerge as the best-liked teacher on campus. His ability as a scholar was not in doubt, but even after the Ohio blemish began to fade, the big schools kept turning him down. Effing had talked about McCarthy, but Barber’s only foray into left-wing politics had been as a fellow traveler with the peace movement back at Columbia in the thirties. He had not been blacklisted in any formal sense, but it was nevertheless convenient for his detractors to surround his name with pinkish innuendos, as if that were finally a better excuse for rejecting him. No one would come copy out and say it, but the feeling was that Barber would simply not fit in. He was too large, somehow, too rambunctious, too thoroughly unrepentant. Imagine a 350-pound titan lumbering through the Yale quads in a ten-gallon hat. It just wouldn’t do. The man had no shame, no sense of decorum. His mere presence would disrupt the order of things, and why court trouble when there were so many candidates to choose from?