No Book but the World: A Novel (6 page)

H
ERE IS A STORY—
the story—we grew up with, the one we were nursed on and cut our teeth on, the one that housed us and rocked us to sleep and gave shape to our days, our doings, our forays into the woods behind our home and into the wider world. The story that shaped our sense of who we were:

Man is by nature good.

Though nowhere woodburned into rough pine and nailed up on the wall, these words might well have been. They might well have decorated every cottage, every stone, every tree trunk around Batter Hollow, for they were writ large in every part of the landscape that was our home: in the absence of rules and routine; in the trust Neel and June afforded us and the self-reliance they instilled in us; in the way our own appetites were encouraged to develop freely, without either approval or disapproval.

We were free children. Or Free Children, for this was official parlance, just as Batter Hollow had famously, for nearly a quarter of a century, been a Free School—no mandatory instruction, no required classes—and when the school closed down and we came along, we were freer even than the old students had been, for there was even less structure, and no division at all between school and life.

Neel, after two childless marriages and half a lifetime superintending hundreds of children not his own, found in us, Fred and me, an opportunity at last to put his beliefs fully into practice, around the clock, from birth. I don’t mean to say he saw us as experiments, or even that he was more theoretician than father.

And yet. He did seem to regard everything as if through a haze of philosophical curiosity, as if everything under the sun was an experiment, all life experiential, all knowledge empirical, and—this was the crux of it—all experience productive of information and therefore good.

Once I came to him pincushioned with nettles. I must have been five, maybe six. I’d fallen down in the grass only to find both palms and one side of my face on fire with pain. I remember running into the house, its dimness after the bright outdoors rendering me half blind, and barreling clumsily toward the cool, camphor-smelling air of his study, where I knew I’d find him. I was screaming all the while in a way that frightened me, reminded me of my brother. I was hysterical not only because of the pain but with a sense of outrage that something in our own backyard could injure me so. By the time I reached his study Neel was already on his feet and charging around his big, heavy desk, on whose corner he smacked his hip, which made him let out such a roar that for a second I was surprised into silence. Then I resumed crying and he carried me into the kitchen, sat me on a stool and assessed my trouble.

Once he’d determined the cause of my anguish, he calmly fixed a paste of baking soda and water, which he applied with the basting brush to all my red welts. As my sobs subsided, he asked me questions about what had happened, displaying deep, Neelesque interest in the most minor details of my account. I could feel him drawing me out, could feel his subdued pleasure as I shared my impressions, transforming happenstance into understood experience.

When I finished unburdening myself, he squinted up at the ceiling as if marvelously deep in thought, then asked if he might accompany me outside so I could show him where I’d fallen. When I pointed out the spot, he bent and—first taking care to wrap his fingers in the handkerchief he always kept neatly folded in a pants pocket—plucked the leaves of the nettle, one by one. “I wonder,” he said, “if we can make soup out of these.” Still hiccoughing a bit, not at all sure I liked the idea and liking even less the fact that the nettles rather than my injury now seemed to occupy his attention, I followed him nonetheless back into the kitchen.

We did make nettle soup, with leeks and butter, and the story became oft-told. He used it in lectures, and it got recycled in a feature article profiling notable figures in progressive education, and later requoted in a book. It wasn’t only Neel who got mileage out of it; I’d tell it, too, at gatherings of old friends, when getting to know new ones, once at a Batter Hollow reunion. I told it at his memorial service, in fact, framing it, then as always, just as Neel had, making it a story about the things he believed most deeply: that learning is born of experience, that suffering is a valuable teacher, and that all nature’s offerings, even those with the capacity to hurt, may be viewed without horror if only we adjust the angle of our perception.

There is one detail I never included, though it was the part I liked best, as well as the reason, I believe, the incident lodged itself so squarely in my memory. In fact, the reason I know my memory is real, not simply a construction based on hearing it so often recounted, is that this aspect of the story was never included in any of the tellings. It is simply this: the look on Neel’s face when I first came into his study, just before he banged his hip on the desk. The look he wore while striding around it, not yet knowing what was the matter, just moving as fast as he could toward the banshee sound I was making: a look of utter, ashen terror.

We grew up godless. I learned this only later, once I’d started going to public school and having regular interactions with the more mainstream citizens of Freyburg, kids whose families had Christmas trees or menorahs, whose weekly attendance was required at Sabbath dinner or Sunday services, girls my age who wore on slender chains around their necks tiny gold crosses or Stars of David, and who, no matter how raucous or mocking or harsh they might be on the soccer field or in the cafeteria (the caf, as the older girls thrillingly called it), were invariably glad to explain, when asked, the meanings of these symbols in clear, apprising tones that made me hopelessly jealous—of their jewelry, yes, but even more than that, of their . . . I don’t know,
membership
. The way they spoke—the lavish surety with which they related captivating accounts of murdered babies and gentle beasts, of anointing with oil and wandering in the wilderness, of angels who rolled back stones and angels who guided a child’s hand to a white-hot coal—created in me my first sharp awareness of impoverishment, of being both an outsider and beyond the pale.

“Don’t you
know
?” they would marvel, eyes widening, when I inquired about some aspect of their story that should apparently have been obvious (
Who are the chosen? It really turns to blood? Why couldn’t they eat the apples? What’s crucify?
), but here again, even the brashest and most supercilious of my peers would respond with a munificent patience they did not otherwise possess, as though it were on loan from another source. Whether such largesse was a mark of their concern for the egregiousness of my ignorance, or whether it signaled a special goodness engendered by religion, either way I was left yearning for what I did not have, and blaming Neel and June for the deprivation.

“Why don’t we go to church?” I demanded at home, causing Neel to widen his eyes theatrically and work his lips ruminatively, a performance of contemplation. Then he went into full Socratic mode:

“Why do you ask?”

“Everyone else does.”

“Everyone?” He raised his bushy white eyebrows. “Really?”

“Basically. Most people. Church or temple.”

“And you’d like it if we went, too?”

“Yes.”

“In order to be like everyone else?”

But I was too clever to let him lead me down that path. “No, Neel. Not to be like them—because
I
think it’s important.”

“What’s important about it?”

I hesitated, then came up with what seemed to me a trump card: “God.”

It must have been a good answer, because he tacked a little to the left. “And what is it you’d do at church?”

“Pray.”

“What does that mean, ‘pray’?”

“Talk to God.”

“Can’t you do that anywhere?”

“It’s not the same as if you do it in church.”

“What’s different about it?”

And so on, until I was ready to heave my knapsack at him.

In the end, though, they decided I should be allowed to experience it for myself, and a few weeks later June took Kitty and me to Quaker services on the other side of the county. I asked June to braid my hair, and Kitty and I both wore skirts and buckled shoes instead of our habitual jeans and sneakers. We rode silently along bumpy back roads, the snowy fields bathed in a thin broth of winter sun. I pressed my mittened hands together in my lap. My scalp felt tight with the braids.

The Friends’ Meeting House turned out to be a plain white clapboard structure with a wide front porch and inside, an austere room with wooden benches arranged in concentric circles. There were only twenty or thirty people there, all of them grown-ups, many of them elderly, sitting mostly in silence for what felt like hours. Every now and then someone would stand and say something uninteresting and sit back down again. I was as bored as I’d ever been in my life. I played with my tongue for a while, tried to see if I could count my teeth with it. I kept thinking how lucky it was Freddy hadn’t come, how if he were there he’d be making noise, using his fingers as drumsticks, kicking rhythms against the bench in front of him, wailing if June tried to make him stop, and how the people, the Friends gathered in this room, would turn their elderly grim faces toward him, toward June, too, and Kitty and me, and silently determine that Freddy was wicked and June negligent, and Kitty and I distasteful by association, and how they wouldn’t understand about who he was, how unmanageable his ways, and how beyond his control because so thoroughly a part of him.

These thoughts made me feel still and mysterious and ancient and sad, almost worthy of my tight braids and skirt and buckled shoes, and when at last people started shaking hands with those sitting near them, and we stood and stretched our stiff cold limbs, I felt as if I’d aged years since I’d woken up that morning.

Then we all filed into the back of the building, where there turned out to be a warm kitchen with applesauce bubbling on an industrial-sized stove and homemade bread and honey—and children! There had been other children there the whole time, off in some other room where they’d been given yarn and sticks for making God’s eyes, which they now displayed happily to their parents. Kitty and I exchanged a look of wordless indignation: apparently we’d missed out on the fun part of church. We bit into our bread and honey with sullen relief.

That was not quite my only foray into formal religion. But for all intents and purposes, I grew up with neither a belief in nor even a rough impression of God. Except that no child grows up entirely godless, not unless deprived of the presence of those first, most tangible of gods: our parents. And they were real eminences, Neel and June. You might think parents who followed the creed of allowing their offspring total freedom in exercising their own judgments, their own curiosities and desires, would seem less god-like than other parents—those who more closely direct, intercede and proscribe. But which is more almighty—an ultimate controller, the author of every stroke and flourish, or a prime mover, one who sets life in motion and then bears witness as we exercise free will?

I only know that to me they seemed the more powerful, the more all-knowing, for their remove, for the myriad ways they refrained from ordering or mediating or salving. Although in this they were not equals. Even at a young age, I was attuned to June’s ambivalence, the way her actions sometimes seemed to call Neel’s own into question.

Once, at a birthday party for one of the Ganns, all the Batter Hollow kids were outside setting off Alka-Seltzer rockets: plastic film canisters in which water and bicarbonate of soda were mingled to combustive effect. It was an unseasonably cold spring day, the air packed with a raw, meaty dampness. Our hands and lips were purple by the time we finished passing around the hose, and as we began to insert the little antacid tablets (the older Gann kids referred to these, knowledgeably, as ammo), a sleety rain began to fall. Our fingers were so numb that the canisters were difficult to seal, but at last we got the rockets capped and lined up along the gravel crescent. Then one by one, with thrilling pops, they sprang into the air high above our heads, trailing white spume.

My jaws ached from chattering and my hands were icy talons, but I remember the giddiness of our laughter as we emulated the whoops of the big kids; remember the sheer glee of being able to shoot things into the air and the pleasure of conspiracy, for we were doing this all on our own, no grown-ups. Our only supervisor was the eldest Gann, a bony-chested teen who’d recently started sporting a beret and a pretty decent Che Guevara mustache, and who exuded such a thrilling air of guerrilla competency that the string of successful explosions felt at once anarchic and ordained.

Into this resplendently adult-free zone stepped June, intruding through the dripping grass in a pair of green rubber boots and a slicker, her arms laden with hats, gloves and scarves scooped from the old steamer trunk that had for decades functioned as the Batter Hollow School lost-and-found. On this cold, wet day, June wove nimbly among us and the detritus of our rockets, laughing a little at her own hennish impulses but earnest in her mission. To the older kids she simply handed protective gear, but with us younger ones she actually stretched the woolen caps over our heads and fitted the mittens onto our uplifted hands. No one protested. If none of us had thought of abandoning our rockets to go inside, we were no less grateful for the warmth she offered us now.

Then across the meadow came Neel, the rain plastering his curls against his head so that he looked like an aged Kewpie. Arms pumping, he strode toward the gravel crescent calling, “June, June!” in an imprecatory tone. “June, please. Let them . . . Don’t inter—” but here he halted both speech and stride, and it was comical, really, the way he stood there sodden and slowly folded his arms, as if in a futile bid for dignity, over his round chest.

What had stopped him was the fact that June had finished. She’d distributed her whole armload of warm things, with nary a complaint from any of us kids—even the oldest, mustache-sporting Gann had accepted a long mustard-colored scarf. Neel stood there in his defeat, some yards off, trying to make a joke of it by fully embracing the ludicrous figure he must have realized he cut: stout and soaked, with rivulets streaming past his bushy white eyebrows and making him squint. He gestured ironically toward June. “My sweet helpmeet,” he said, biting off the end consonant theatrically.