The Boy Detective (25 page)

The avenue, so important to us kids, is not known for much history. An anarchist bombing occurred here in 1914. And a few years ago, there was an explosion at Forty-first Street, when a geyser of steam scalded dozens of pedestrians. To anyone who has seen
The Seven Year Itch,
Lexington Avenue is where Marilyn Monroe stood over an IRT subway grate in front of the Loew's Lexington movie theater, her white skirt billowing up to heaven.

Down from Fifty-first Street again tonight, walking toward Gramercy Park. The avenue funnels bright before me like the barrel of a gun, and the winter sky turns purple. From
Shadow on the Wall
a detective learns that when faced with information that makes no sense yet comes from a reliable source, you need to imagine an explanation. Take a leap. When you have eliminated the impossible, what remains, however improbable, must be the truth. Don't look for the Indian. Look for the feather.

 

S
OMETHING
F
AULKNER SAID
in
Light in August
: “Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders.” He seems to think of memory as a kind of faith. And he is proved right, if we dredge up old Jay Gatsby, believing with all his might in the past as he attempts to re-create it. And Daisy, the worthless object of desire, the flimsy embodiment of the past herself, could not care less. Yet Gatsby keeps the faith.

So, does this mean that a memoir is an act of faith, and that the various worlds we write into creation represent our way of making a heaven and a church—all the things that receive belief? A god itself? We might ask ourselves why this form of writing exists. And the answer may be that the memoir is an instrument by which we redo our lives in order to have something to believe in. As unhappy or confused as our memories may be—as chilling or terrifying or just plain sad—the accretion of them, nonetheless, becomes a kind of altar at which we worship. The structure constitutes our salvation. Quasimodo cries out to the cathedral of Notre Dame, If only I were made out of stone like thee. The church, our Lady of Memory, becomes our sanctuary.

Which is to say, students, your memoir is not about you. So, stay out of it. Keep clear of your memoir, except in those instances where your idiosyncratic, weird, freakish life speaks for others, for all lives. As you write, let your mind wander, for wandering is necessary for your memoir. Let your mind wander to subjects outside your worries, shames, griefs, and traumas—no matter how devastating or exciting they may be—to history, plain facts, abstract thoughts, and to the people for whom you write. At the outset of a memoir, you are propelled by the desire to let the world know who you are. Soon you will discover that you don't really care that much about who you are, and that writing with that goal alone will turn boring, cloying. You will tire of yourself just as you tire of others who think only of themselves, and whose chatterings are mere perseverations of autobiography.

I'll say it again. Your life is not about you. Or to put it more usefully, it is about the you in you that is common to everyone. Your life is about everyone. In his tender
Autobiography,
the poet Edwin Muir describes his emotional awakening after undergoing psychoanalysis for the first time. “I saw that my lot was the human lot,” he writes. And “in my own unvarnished likeness, I was one among all men and women.” To see that is not only to acknowledge something essential about one's life. It also serves the writing of the memoir by diverting the reader's attention from the one to the many, while at the same time, the one uses the many to try to discover who the one really is and what his story is about. Your memoir is not about you. You are the world in which you walk, you and everyone else, to boot.

 

“T
HIS IS WHERE
Daddy was born,” says Ginny with a sweep of her arm. Our three children inspect Gramercy Park as if they might uncover mementos of my birth. Arrowheads. Here memory recalls memory. The scene is a floral print. I feel powerful and useless in my stride, the way the giants of fairy tales must feel when they encounter heroes of normal size. The gravel crunches under our feet. Soon it is Verdun, and I am trying to rush ahead of Ginny and the kids in order to take the first volley of shells. Bullets fly like apples. I am shouting, “Down! Get down!” Then it is spring again. Everyone is okay.

 

W
HAT IF WE
thought of time not as a measurement and not as an abstraction, but rather as a place—a city, for instance, or a part of a city, or a park—a place you can leave yet never leave? In your mind, of course. We are speaking of your mind. Yet this city, or part of a city, or park, does nothing to you, the way time, normally defined, can. And you can do nothing to it, the way you can waste time, normally defined, or kill it. Time seen as a place simply serves you as a permanent point of reference. And, like any old place, there are good things associated with it, and bad. But neither good nor bad, happy thoughts or unhappy thoughts, or feelings of anxiety or serenity or any feeling at all has the slightest effect on the fact that this is your place in the world. Period. Here you stand, or walk. And here you wait to see whatever will happen to you, which turns out to be the very thing that is happening to you as you stand, or walk.

So, if you buy the hypothesis, this is your place of time. It is here that you recognize yourself, however dimly, and here that you steady yourself when need be, and regroup. The where is the when. And if you should happen to wear a wristwatch in the where, the watch's face would show neither hands nor numbers, but rather trees, shops, even yourself, your image. What? Do you think the world would be worse off if this were so? If you put your mind to it, could you not intuit a train schedule, or the minutes it takes to cook an egg? If you put your mind to it, whenever someone asked you the time, could you not look at your wrist and answer, “My home. My silent home”?

 

A
FTER WEEKEND PERFORMANCES,
I would head downtown to visit my mother in the Bialystoker Nursing Home on the Lower East Side, not far from Hester Street, where she used to teach. The performances were of a one-man show I wrote in 1991, called
Free Speech in America,
at the American Place Theatre. Some great plays were put on at the American Place, directed by its founder, Wynn Handman, such as William Alfred's
Hogan's Goat
and Robert Lowell's
The Old Glory.
Mine was hardly in that category. Yet it got a rave from the
New York Times,
thus what I expected to be a three-week run turned into a small hit that ran six months. Not being an actor, I ran out of steam and finally called a halt to it. I was spending as much on cab fare to and from the theater as I was making for the play. You know what they say: “You can make a killing in the theater, but not a living.”

By then, my mother lived in the impenetrable darkness of Alzheimer's. The Bialystoker home was not fancy but clean and efficiently run, and the nurses were attentive. The floors were linoleum and the walls too brightly lit. The home smelled of soap and old people, who lay in beds not far from one another, separated by screens. A belligerent little woman used to roll nonstop through the aisles in her wheelchair at ridiculous speeds, cursing and complaining, her small hard face like a boxing jab. My mother rarely spoke. Once she mentioned that Mr. Homer had made a pass at her and had wanted to marry her after my father died. She smiled saying that. There was a two-week interval in which she was lucid, so much so that Ginny and I asked the doctor if my mother was actually getting better. He said such spasms of clarity were normal, and that she would slide back to the unreachable country, and she did. She usually recognized me, but often she would just smile or stare. Whenever Peter and Ginny joined me, she looked as if she knew us. Most of the time when I sat alone beside her bed, we maintained the silence that was familiar to us both.

 

A
SSUMING THAT YOUR
head has cleared in death, Mother, could you possibly spare a few minutes? I'd like to tell you something I've learned from a lifetime of detective work. I promise not to ask unseemly questions. You would not be accused. You would not be put on trial to explain yourself (as if that were possible for any of us). The maple leaves would rise and fall around us—say we were sitting on a park bench, one of the benches with commemorative plaques. Sparrows would peek out of their little holes in the birdhouse. At other benches, the Gramercy women would be speaking of Switzerland and the Catholic Church. Your cronies at the Marshall Chess Club would be on hand if you should need them, and your mother, too, and Patta, and your sister Julia, perhaps even Peter and Dad. And there would be other people, sights and sounds you are comfortable with, so you would have no cause for anxiety. Then, when you were at ease and assured that all was safe, and that I meant well, I would tell you, after a long embrace, and though I did not mean it, that I no longer wish to be right.

 

R
OUND AND ROUND
the park. Round and round. My favorite part of being a detective is just this—the walk, just taking in the world. Soon enough someone will engage us on a hunt, a project. And off we will go, armed to the hilt with whatever powers we possess, of reason, deduction, and style. We shall put our powers to use for the sake of honor, decency, and justice. And that's all to the good, just as it should be in a life that yearns for honor, decency, and justice.

But before all that, and afterward, too, life calls for nothing but itself. And we do not so much pursue it as let it wrap around us, and just as quickly, unwrap, like the wind. Now that I think about it, the reason I sat at the kitchen window working on the sill day after day may have had less to do with the digging than with what it had avoided. The dog that did not bark. The digging into the marble sill may simply have been a diversion from the world I saw whenever I looked up. My view. And I was so overwhelmed with what lay before me, the grand endless mystery that opened before me, that I averted my gaze for fear of being blinded. For past the window lay the city, and the pitch of the rooftops, and the pulse of the clouds, and the black water tanks, and the trees reaching up and the people reaching up, and everyone and everything murmuring in a silent chorus, “We're alive.” I felt that myself. “I'm alive.” And I may have realized, in the hidden way that children realize things, that the idea of life, wondrous life, was stronger and more durable than any assaults, loud or silent, that of all the gifts my world afforded whenever I walked out into it, the most terrifying and miraculous was this announcement, “I'm alive,” enforced with every step.

How do you walk in the world? That's no trick. The
how
is easy. Or if it is not always easy, it is at least clear. How to walk in the world? Walk as the private eye walks. Do right, play fair, ignore the trash, and keep your nose clean. But
why
does one walk in the world? That's another matter. Which brings me to you, as ever, and you to me. Will you be my partner? Shall we do our walking side by side? What do you say? See? I wasn't tracking you, after all—through the fog and the screams and the gunshots. I might have thought I was tracking you. But all I ever wanted was to face you, in the blessed, blazing light.

And now it is past midnight. And the park is visible only in contours, ghost-trees that menace us no longer. I am alone no longer, and neither are you. So why do we walk in the world? The pitch of the rooftops, and the pulse of the clouds, and the black water tanks, and the trees reaching up and the people reaching up. And you, pal. Guilty, blameless you.

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to Ginny Rosenblatt, Dan Halpern, Jane Freeman, Libby Edelson, Gloria Loomis, Leon Wieseltier, Julia Masnik, Lou Ann Walker, David Lynn, and Kay Allaire.

About the Author

ROGER ROSENBLATT's
essays for
Time
and
The NewsHour
on PBS have won two George Polk Awards, the Peabody, and an Emmy. He is the author of six off-Broadway plays and sixteen books, including the national bestsellers
Kayak Morning
,
Making Toast
,
Unless It Moves the Human Heart
,
Rules for Aging
, the novel
Lapham Rising
, and
Children of War
, which won the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He has held the Briggs-Copeland appointment in the teaching of writing at Harvard, and is currently Distinguished Professor of English and Writing at Stony Brook University.

 

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Also by Roger Rosenblatt

Kayak Morning

Unless It Moves the Human Heart

Making Toast

Beet

Lapham Rising

Children of War

Rules for Aging

Witness

Anything Can Happen

Black Fiction

Coming Apart

The Man in the Water

Consuming Desires

Life Itself

Where We Stand

Credits

Cover design by Steve Attardo

Cover photograph © by SuperStock

Copyright

Portions of this book have appeared, in different forms, in the
New Republic
, the
New York Times Book Review
, the
Washington Post
, and
Time
magazine.

THE BOY DETECTIVE
. Copyright © 2013 by Roger Rosenblatt. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

FIRST EDITION

ISBN 978-0-06-224133-7

EPUB Edition © NOVEMBER 2013 ISBN 9780062241344

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