The Boy Detective (13 page)

Sail on, my fellow voyagers. Sail under a clear sky, in the rolling forest of the night. Sail, and be safe. And, to be sure, I take note of your tentative movements. But see, even the snow hesitates tonight. We all sail with the same fear in the wind. From a great quiet you came, and toward a great quiet you proceed. Look there, in the black sky, on the port side of the horizon, a bright badge spewed with spices. Lo! Hark! The singing and chatter of life! And remember what Thetis told Achilles, that he had not long to live. And when the frightened Achilles reported to Patroclus what she had said, Patroclus told him: Pay no attention to her. She's a god. She tells that to everyone.

Long live the red dust on the stoops. Long live the ankle-length garment of the false prophet who skitters across the ramp at Fortieth and Park. Long live the weeds that insist upon voicing their opinions from the crevices of the chipped asphalt. Long live the obscenity. Long live the walk.

 

Y
OU CAN'T GO
for a successful walk in an agitated or fretful state of mind. Try it, and your pace will quicken to a near trot, or slow to a near crawl, a snail's pace. The true walk requires a mind finely balanced between confidence and excitement. And if you are not of such a mind when you start out, the walk itself sometimes will create it in you. But you must be open to change. Like detective work, good walking is for liberals. Your correct state of mind is neither passionate nor dispassionate. It is a smile without the mouth turned up. It takes in and gives out as well, being at once idle and hard at work. Such a balanced stance suits the flaneur, the literary wanderer who creates the sights he takes in. Wordsworth was a flaneur of the countryside, as De Quincey was a flaneur of the city. Whitman was known as a “boulevardier,” an elegant stroller. Frank O'Hara made mental maps as he walked in New York. His world grew lovelier, ecstatic.

I wonder what my personal cartographer would make of my territory. Haphazard map, lurching its way through the crazy syntax of side streets and three random parks, then up the avenues that changed their names, and east to the river with a million currents, and west to the middle of Manhattan, if you please. Cut out all the surrounding acreage, and what have we?
Hic sunt dracones.
My compass spins out of whack. My legend unreadable, my navigations berserk. In the deepest frost, snow falling like ashes, my cartographer goes about with pencil and sextant. Is this the New World? I ask him. Always has been, he says.

Winter. Winter. A cerement in the word. Two homeless men and one homeless woman pile themselves together on the steps of the Marble Collegiate Church at Twenty-ninth and Fifth. The men have hair like thatched roofs. The woman is a cartridge shell. They stare at me like rifles. Their canteens are empty, their gear spread wide like flattery. I want to ask them how the battle went, much less the war. The woman mutters, “Gawd.” Where is Matthew Brady when you need him?

 

W
HERE'S
J
OHNNY
M
ORRIS
when you need him, I'd like to know, when America has no natural heroes left and every so-called national leader looks twice before he fails to leap. Not Johnny Morris. He who organized evening tackle football games in the park (I used Peter's diapers as shoulder pads). He who printed programs for the games, and positioned flashlights in the trees to illuminate the gravel field, and saw to it that all the neighborhood parents were invited. He who protected the little guy, especially his younger brother, Mark. He included everyone. He who established snow forts and capture-the-flag games and ring-a-levio, and who said one fine spring day, “You be the pitcher.” So I became a pitcher. He who got a Nok Hockey game for Christmas, and when I told my dad that I wanted one, too, Johnny said, “You don't need a game of your own. If I have one, we all have one.” He who papered the wall of his room at number 34 with full-page photos of pro athletes, ripped out of
Sport
magazine. And when he did that, so did I. When his dad suddenly switched jobs, the Morrises moved up to Westchester and the air went out of Gramercy Park, and the light and the shout. Whenever Johnny carried the football tucked to his chest, he half-sang, half-muttered “They Always Call Me Mr. Touchdown” under his breath, as an accompaniment to his game. He used to say I was the smart one.

 

I
N
P
ENNSYLVANIA
, on an overnight at summer camp, a bunch of us boys strayed from the group and went for an evening walk, on which we came upon a deserted farmhouse. One lame-brained kid, who used to amuse himself by pulling the legs off frogs, casually tossed a rock at an upstairs window. He missed. Another boy came closer, his rock hitting just below the sill with a slap. Then all the boys picked up rocks and hurled them at the empty gray farmhouse. Its paint was peeling. It stood like a headstone against the slate of the sky. A few minutes passed. I watched the others throw their rocks, and considered whether or not I wanted to join in. Then, acting on a reflex more than a thought, I picked up an especially good rock and threw it at that upstairs window. I was a pitcher. I did not miss.

Drink in the fresh-mowed grass. Grind the dirt under your cleats. Stare in. Turn away. Do we ever leave our childhood? “Roger is a good athlete” read my second-grade report card. “But he doesn't like to play with other children.” More problem than compliment in that, since most of the sports one plays require the cooperation of other children. Consider the person who can play with his peers but chooses not to, and so is left in a self-confounding position—he who stands alone among other players, elevated, the center of attention who is at the same time ignored by his teammates, expendable and indispensable, at once in and out of the game.

The thing about pitching, about being a pitcher, is that you want to make the batter appreciate what you have thrown at him, but only after the ball has settled in the catcher's mitt. The batter looks at the ball, and then at you. You look at him, but only briefly, a glance. You don't want to taunt him. You let the ball do that. And then he looks away, as in a dream, having coming to terms with the fact that the only way to understand what you have done is when it is too late for him to do anything about it. Like detective work. Like writing.

 

M
Y FATHER
, game to play catcher, crouches for me in the driveway of an inn we are staying at in Southampton. I pitch to him, too fast, maybe. Unthinkingly, maybe. A rare flicker of fear in his eyes as he reaches for the ball—the flicker I saw years later, after his first heart attack. Then it was submerged. Now it lies on the surface, and is laced with his being impressed with me—rarer still—impressed that I can throw as fast as that. In fact, my fastball seemed fast only to him. In my first varsity game in high school, my first pitch, a fastball, hit the batter in the shoulder. I stepped off the mound to see if he was okay. He stood at the plate, chuckling.

A game of catch between father and son. A game of catch between me and our children. Not quite the same as pitcher-catcher, which is more purposeful, more aggressive, but generally the same idea. The ball flies between the generations, between the hearts and minds. It's not called “throw,” that game, because the idea is that you'll catch each other, that father and children will understand each other in the silent way we do. My father and I understand each other, in the driveway.

Richard Wilbur visited a modern poetry class I was teaching at Harvard in the 1960s. He listened to my students interpret several of his poems, then said, to their delight: “It's nice to meet people who catch what you're throwing.” Especially a curve.

 

W
RITING IS
unreasonably demanding. A tyrant, a regular Stalin, when you get down to it. Why do I have to produce an ocean in the morning, much less paint the sun-streaks on it, much less the plaster clouds or the goddam sun itself? What do you take me for, anyway—a court magician, a wizard in a stupid star-splashed dunce's hat? A down-and-out sketch artist on lower Fifth on a Sunday afternoon, awaiting your ten bucks so that I might make your chin more manly or give you a nose job in charcoal? I'm not God, for Chrissake, or Christ, for God's sake. I'm not your father, either, if that's what you're thinking, and even if I were your father, aren't you old enough by now to fetch your own ocean? Oh, never mind. I'm just venting. You didn't create this case. I did. I, and the smirking sheet of paper that says, in the greasy voice of a racetrack tout, how about an ocean this morning, pal? Yeah. And make it original.

 

N
ATURALLY, YOU DON'T
get there all at once, or on your own. It took two seasoned private eyes to show me the ropes. The first was Rowse B. Wilcox, whom I had only for ninth grade English, but that was enough to begin forging the connection between literature and detective work. He was too drunk too often, so the school canned him. To be sure, he had been indispensible to hundreds of students for decades, but he was dying anyway. Why not send him into exile? So Mr. Wilcox took up his final residence here where I am now, at the Prince George Hotel on Twenty-eighth Street between Madison and Fifth, built in 1904 and restored to much of its former grandeur after decades as a flophouse. Our first real teacher, he taught us that a verb could contain the force of a noun, as in “the leaf pinwheeled to the ground.” He taught us the difference between drama and melodrama. “Drama is opposed activity with conflict. Melodrama is opposed activity without conflict.” Bony, like Lincoln, he sat up in front of the room at the chipped wooden desk, legs crossed like chopsticks. He had a lusty reputation with the girls. I do not remember his voice.

When, in my sophomore year, I heard that he was living out his days at the Prince George Hotel, I went to visit him. He greeted me in the lobby, and we chatted among the faux antiques and the Victorian bric-a-brac in one of the public rooms, sitting in plush purple armchairs with tears in the upholstery. Pastel columns held up the room, in which there also was a dry fountain, faded murals, and a fire going under a cracked marble mantelpiece. A tall mirror rose above the mantelpiece and a crystal chandelier, disproportionately large, above that. He wore a tie and a suit jacket that did not match his pants. The jacket was gray, the pants brown. His vest hung loose. His eyes were bleary, but he had shaved. His shirt cuffs were stained with tobacco. He was pleased to see me, I believe. Perhaps he was pleased to have any visitors at all.

Walking home, I remember feeling sad and helpless, and that I was losing someone who held the secrets of the life I dimly sought, someone I might trust. A grown-up I might trust. We did not talk long. Half an hour, maybe a little more. He chain-smoked and said interesting things that I forget. He did most of the talking, since I had little to say but thank you.

 

S
EE WHAT YOU
make of this dream, in which I decided to spend the night at the Prince George Hotel myself. When I registered at the desk, I learned from the clerk, who was the spitting image of Elisha Cook Jr. as he appeared in
The Maltese Falcon,
that Dylan Thomas was staying in the hotel, was in fact living there, since Caitlin had thrown him out for good this time. He had lurched at too many breasts, two too many. No, wait. It wasn't Dylan Thomas. It was Tennessee Williams, that's who was there, just for the night. But since I favored poets in those days, I'm saying it was Dylan Thomas staying in the hotel. And when I gathered the courage to introduce myself to him that evening, in the bar, over a grasshopper, I told him I was Tennessee Williams, just to put myself on an even footing with him, and I extended my hand. But, he said, politely but firmly, as southern gentlemen do, “
I
am Tennessee Williams.” “Are you certain?” I asked. He nodded, smiling. So then I said, feeling bolder by the second, that that must mean
I
am Dylan Thomas. And before he could recover his composure, because he was meeting Dylan Thomas at last, whom he had admired all those years, while never stooping to say, “I'm a big fan,” I retreated to my room in the hotel, the little red one that shared a bath with Samuel Beckett, who, as luck would have it, was also an overnight guest. And I spent the entire night sleepless, though ecstatic, considering a rapprochement with Caitlin, while writing “The Hunchback in the Park.”

 

C
RIPPLES, DRUNKS, LECHERS
, madmen. Is it possible to sympathize with everyone? That is what we are supposed to do on our illimitable walk, or so they say. How about Pol Pot or the Japanese soldiers in Nanking or our own soldiers at My Lai? Joyce's Bloom sympathized with everyone, and see where it got him. I don't know. I like Joyce's bourgeois Ulysses and Robert Graves's girl-crazy Ulysses well enough, I suppose, but I much prefer the original wild sailor, or even Tennyson's old salt who strove, sought, found, and did not yield.

It is assumed of such heroes, people of certain magnitude, as Aristotle put it and Matthew Arnold repeated, that they are above sympathizing with the lower orders. But there is no evidence of that, one way or the other. What drove Quixote to attack the giants? What drove George C. Scott's Sherlock Holmes, in all the nuttiness of his quest for Moriarty, but the desire to ennoble the world for everyone, not just for himself? This is the detective's kind of sympathy. And the writer's. Both see people for what they are, judging privately, yet leaving cosmic judgment to others—perhaps the deepest sort of sympathy there is.

And love gets in the act. It does. The detective may seek honor over love, yet ideally he wants both. Love personal and love general. For all his hard-boiled patter, he believes that love defines us, that if love prevailed over all competing emotions in the first place, there would be no cupidity, no crime. He knows we are composed of the choices we make, sometimes imprisoned by them. Yet he also knows, though he does not say so, that love trumps all our choices. If memory acknowledged nothing but love, we would be so light-hearted, we would be able to fly. But we are not able to fly. Even the dumbest PI knows that. The dumbest and the saddest.