The Family of Max Desir

by Robert Ferro

  He and the dog were nearly the same age. When he was sixteen Max was told to have him put to sleep. He considered the suggestion for three days. Everything had slowed down between them but they were brothers. Somehow it was a test. John and Marie wanted to involve him directly so that afterward there would be no recriminations.

  Max took him. The dog sat trembling on the seat of the car. It was over in a few minutes. The dog went to sleep and was gone. As he was driving away Max looked over his shoulder and saw the veterinarian’s assistant put something the right color into a smoking incinerator. It was five o’clock in the afternoon. He drove home and went up to the attic, where lately he’d been experimenting with oil paints. He pulled the room apart, slashed the canvases, squirted oil paints on the wall, wept. Down in the kitchen Marie and John—who had just come home from work and wanted to know what was going on— wondered if they had done the right thing.

  SUMMERS THEY RENTED A SUCCESSION OF COTTAGES in a succession of resorts on the New Jersey shore. This they had done since Max and Penny were bom, before the resorts were completely established, when all the men were away and blackout curtains covered the windows under bright starry nights. Home movies in fact showed a time of stark simplicity, with two or three striped umbrellas in acres of white empty beach; of women alone with their children, squinting into the sun without dark glasses. Max holds Penny’s hand at the water’s edge. They are four and three. The shot is not staged; in another that is, Marie twirls in front of the camera in a new bathing suit with a short skirt. She looks in turn over each of her raised shoulders and extends her arms down and back, in a pose she had lately seen a model strike in the Pathé News. Her hair is long and sepia-colored. She is thirty-six, one year younger than Max is now.

  Winters, at Christmas, all of Marie’s family and some of John’s came to stay overnight. Uncle Frank did magic tricks and carried on. After midnight Mass they had potatoes and eggs and the adults stayed up the rest of the night playing pinochle, not only because they enjoyed cards but because there weren’t enough beds for everyone to sleep in at once. A diagram was posted on the refrigerator. Max slept in the attic, part of which had been made into an irregular room covered with the kind of paper used to line Victorian toy boxes. A space heater, with crisscrossing V’s of red coils, sent out a thin metallic hum. The sheets were ice. A red glow filled the peaked space. Max and two or three cousins, at the top of the house like the detail at the top of a painting, warmed the beds for their uncles, who would pass them on the stairs in the early morning, stubble on their chins, their eyes shot with fatigue. Each year, as John progressed, the array of gifts was more dazzling. At thirteen, Max was given a Schwinn bicycle that was extremely beautiful although it had fat tires and took great strength to pedal. He’d been dreaming recurrently of a white horse for three or four years. It had got to and beyond the point of medical, if not outright psychological consultation. When John and Marie went out for the evening or away on a trip, they would return with a small equine statuette. Max had upward of twenty of them. The year of the Schwinn was the year he most completely expected the unreasonable gift of a live horse. He had thought it through. Half of the large detached garage would make a stall. The farm and fields lay just up the road.

  The horse that came to collect him at night on the ledge outside his window was white. Max and his brother Jack shared a bedroom; on half the nights Jack had to tell him to get back in bed. The horse was a presence, benign and strong. Max stepped from the ledge onto his back and they flew off. They traveled together, nothing could be simpler. In the mornings, at a doctor’s urging, Marie inquired into the latest excursion as if Max had just come in from the airport. And he would reply, An island to the south, the local hills, a place where there was snow on the ground. He thought he saw through the inquiries but liked sharing the experiences. Meanwhile his collection of horse statuettes grew. Some were of porcelain, some of bronze, a few of wood. He kept them on a shelf by his bed. The psychiatrist, interchangeable in John’s and Marie’s opinion with, in this case, a quack hypnotist— who in the end only made Max’s eyes water—had suggested a process of transference as a way out of the dilemma. But the dreams went on, the travels continued; the relationship with the white horse, rather than becoming externalized into any or all of the statuettes, existed independently of them. The horse was his, a benevolent creature that came from a place inaccessible to everyone else—his own dreams. He knew he imagined the horse; it was the imagining that made it real.

  Once he took one of the statuettes outdoors, a substantial mistake. It was not the having of the statuettes that activated the transference but the use to which they were put. It was not possible to control the image of the horse when imposed on the gorgeous and banal reality of the morning, amid a number of rocks and a tree stump in the back yard that approximated Monument Valley. Being called upon to move from one place to another, the horse could not bend its legs or move its head. Max turned it over in his hand and looked at it closely. This was a bronze statuette and not a very good one; he had won it himself in the amusement park at the beach. He stood up and hurled it deep into the woods across the street where eventually the Costas built their house. He retrieved the statuette, but never played with any of them again. This particular bronze is the last one still in his possession, only because it was subsequently separated from the herd.

  It was the Schwinn finally that banished the dream horse, which perhaps had only meant freedom and mobility. Riding the bike provided many of the same sensations as the dream. It seemed at the time that his disappointment and embarrassment at finding the Schwinn beside the tree—the gleaming approximation of his dream instead of its prancing embodiment—was a failure that caused the horse to flee, for after that Christmas it never appeared to him again.

  He did, also, about this time, take up with live horses. He and his friend Scott, similarly passionate about similar things, rode up to a range of foothills within cycling distance, to a livery stable with energetic horses and endless trails. It was not the same as in his dreams. The horses were not interested in taking him places, or in being cloudlike and mysterious. He fell off, and once was nearly crushed when a huge bay went down on its knees, put its head back and began to roll over, Max, saddle and all. He stepped off, waited for the horse to right itself, then got back on—a parenthetical lapse, over in a moment; to the horse, this time, Max was the bewildering illusion.

  BENEATH ONE OF THE OUTDOOR BALCONIES was a flagstone terrace and cutting garden in which Marie had planted pansies, asters, zinnias, dahlias. This was overhung with the lacy leaves of two large white birches and an immense oak that later was blown down in a storm. His older sister Robin is sitting on a wooden bench, dressed in white as a young angel of the church. It is the day of her confirmation and of Max’s first holy communion. Marie stands behind Robin brushing her long chestnut hair. The sun strikes the nimbus of white through the leaves. The dog is barking up at Max on the balcony. Marie looks up, the brush in her hand, and smiles. In her smile, he thinks, is the awareness of one of the pure, perfect moments of her life.

  In a home movie of that day’s dual ceremonies, the white line snakes up the steps of the church, segments of little boys interlaced with segments of little girls, hands clasped around white prayerbooks and nosegays of tiny flowers. The wind lifts the girl’s veils here and there in sudden soundless diaphanous explosions. Max appears. He looks into his father’s camera. His face is blanched by the enormity of the occasion. He does not think he is ready to receive the Host. The large limestone church is new, its construction due largely to John Desir’s inspired fund-raising. This double ceremony has been delayed for its completion. The vestibule smells of fresh cement, dank stone, lilies. It has nauseated Max. The moisture from his hands has loosened the cover of his prayerbook. Unlike the other boys he is wearing long pants, to cover the bandages on his legs. He remembers the stiff-legged constriction of climbing the steps outside the church, but the camera does not pick that
up.

  Marie bandaged him every night for long periods during the winter, using soft old sheets rolled into strips and stored neatly in the drawer of his night table, in rows, like little mounds of baker’s dough. If he wasn’t bandaged at night he scratched his arms and legs; in the morning they would be bleeding and raw. At St John’s in the winter season, he wore white gloves. Sometimes Marie put long black socks up over his arms at night, turning them back into feet. In the mornings he wished for a slide that could take him down the stairs without having to bend his knees. Entering the kitchen he wondered that no one else must face this sort of thing. Apart from the hypnotist—a last resort—he was taken each year to a different doctor. No one could say why he had the affliction, which had appeared when he was a few weeks old, an eczema that covered his body up to the neck. Because of the bandages he didn’t walk until he was nearly four. In the summer at the beach it left him, and came back in the fall. After his twelfth or thirteenth year less reappeared each time.

  The white gloves occasioned rude remarks at school. They were of thin cotton, to be used once and thrown away, the left identical to the right and worn upside down. During this period all four children were sent down the street to the pink mansion for piano lessons. Mrs Watson suggested Max’s lessons be discontinued, complaining of blood on her piano keys, an image she herself knew to be Romantic, but which might not be right for the child.

  But by the time he was six they noticed he tapped his feet to the music, the bandages notwithstanding. Friday evenings before the era of television, John gave them lessons in ballroom dancing. Everyone of the older generation could dance—intricate, sophisticated maneuvers; the Peabody, the Montmartre (pronounced Mo-Mart), the Lindy, the Black Bottom. Max learned the steps easily, but it was the syncopation of tap he liked. Marie thought he needed something of his own. In the fourth grade he began private lessons at the Phyllis Weeks School of the Dance, downtown near the railway trestle, across from Calloway’s Drugstore.

  His first performance, of a routine he had just been taught, was for his own fourth-grade classmates at St John’s on St Valentine’s Day. After lunch the desks were arranged in a large circle. A record and phonograph in the coatroom sounded quite actual, like a real piano in the next room. The children, untouched by TV, were naively appreciative. When he finished, Sister Margaret noticed ’ that one of his leg bandages had come unraveled; the end of it snaked out behind him like something crawling up his leg or caught on his shoe. She took him into the coatroom and Max watched the record spinning noiselessly in the machine while the nun knelt before him and rewound the cotton strip around his leg.

  He continued to take dancing lessons into high school. The fact that he had talent obscured larger, sexist considerations: out of fifty or sixty students in the studio, only three were boys. For this reason he was in great demand at the yearly recitals, held each June at Indian River High. The three boys ran on and offstage like overworked vaudevillians. During the school year they performed an abbreviation of the recital—the cream of the revue—once or twice a month. He and the other two boys and a few girls would entertain at the Veterans’ Home, the Kiwanis or a remote nursing home. For these performances Miss Weeks received seventy-five dollars, of which she gave twenty to the piano player. The children got the experience. Members of the audience were apt to get up and dance with you. Marie insisted only that Max be picked up and brought home each time.

  It seemed entirely possible to him that, if he liked, he could be a professional dancer. Word of this idea may have got out, either directly through something he said or from the enthusiasm he brought to performing. His idea was to go to New York and become a gypsy, a chorus boy. This would lead to stardom on the musical stage. For a girl this was considered moderately respectable, if rare; it was called becoming a Rockette. Miss Weeks had been a Rockette. But for boys, at thirteen or fourteen, dancing lessons were only suspect.

  Following his solo performance in his last recital at the end of his fifteenth year, he was informed by Penny, who wore an expression of wide-eyed naivete, that John was afraid dancing would make his son a fairy—a remark that had been addressed to Marie. This accounted for the charged silence and polite applause greeting his somewhat arty routine. Miss Weeks had wanted to try something different; a balletic element had been added in certain steps which, even as he performed them, he recognized as effeminate. Out it went over the footlights, a message that John read clearly.

  Max was meant to hear the fairy remark. That was the point. If it was supposed to be a shot across his bow it was poorly aimed, scoring instead a direct hit; the ship of dance went straight to the bottom, and with it the idea of Broadway. He quit taking lessons, and found they had been free for years. In the early, difficult years, when they had seemed a luxury, Marie had tried to stop them on financial grounds. But boys were so scarce Miss Weeks had been happy to teach him for nothing. And Marie could think of no other reason for him to stop.

  They drove on certain Sundays to Brooklyn, to Avenue U and Avenue J, to John’s and Marie’s families. Max was distrustful of any force of organization that would choose a system of names out of the alphabet. Who could care for such streets? Everything was unintentionally close together, with abbreviations of driveways, compressed approximations of front yards, the houses nearly but not quite touching. His relatives, and the neighbors with whom their lives had become entwined, were exaggerated, theatrical and raw. The old people seemed fierce, especially in the eyes and around the mouth, with intensely held opinions and vivid personal quirks. John’s mother, Grandma Desiderio, talked in the dialect of a Sicilian hill town, delivered with such high-pitched staccato urgency as to be unintelligible except in terms of stark dread and alarm. Her funeral was like an opera, the ripe, full-blown production of a transplanted culture reverting in death to the old, intense ways; with women in black sitting in vigil for three days like crows on a lawn, with huge floral tributes—a clock of carnations stopped horticulturally at the hour of death, and her favorite chair fatly reproduced lifesize in mums and roses, with a macabre scene at the end when Grandpa Desiderio, momentarily roused from confusion by the enormity of his loss, the horror of change, broke loose from those supporting him, rushed down the chapel aisle and threw himself into his wife’s coffin, sobbing one last time on the hardened flesh, calling her wretched names, hating her for leaving him behind.

  For five or six years when Max was in grammar and then high school, Marie ran a dress shop in town with a woman neighbor. John wanted to get ahead. He wanted his own company. The shop would help to make that possible and it prospered in a small way. Marie filled the racks with clothes she herself would wear. The Rosary Society women came and returned because Marie told them what looked good and what didn’t. Her prices were fair, her taste highly developed for a small town. She planted evergreen bushes and seasonal flowers in boxes across the front. One Halloween the picture Max painted on their window won a prize.

  Marie’s partner, who lived across the street, had two sons, the elder of whom, though two years younger than Max, was his closest friend. The boy was named Donny but called Dee. Dee was honey-colored and blond, a Ganymede. They had grown up together, their friendship reinforced by that of their mothers, but when Max was fifteen it was suggested that Dee was too young for him, and Max was encouraged to play with his other friends, particularly Scott. He saw Dee less often. But when he did, Max was seized by an overpowering desire to touch him, an impulse he half understood and disguised. Dee complained that Max jumped on him every time they met, and thereafter Max held himself back, feigning a composure and indifference that left him exhausted and confused.

  When he was fifteen he played spin-the-bottle at a small private party, with a wheel of eight or ten girls and boys; everyone. The bottle spun for so long it seemed to have the capacity to choose. He remembered, also, eating up one end of a wax straw and thinking that if it were a strand of spaghetti it would need another five minutes. Sharon Woolf gave him a kiss at
the middle, just her lips around the straw, she perhaps having eaten a bit more of it than he.

  Max’s brother Jack was oddly protective, making his friends behave with Max as they would with his sisters, shutting them up every time some wisp of innuendo escaped them. Dee and his other friends seemed to have had similar educators, protectors, censors. But one night in a tent in Dee’s back yard, the classic rites of masturbation occurred. The impossible tickle yielded a teaspoonful of liquid that had waited so long for tapping as to have turned lightly green, or so it seemed by candlelight.

  Shortly afterward, a girl who cleaned for Marie once a week, named Louella, started to rearrange Max’s bed on the last day of a dragged-out flu. Suddenly she pulled down the covers and his pajamas and put his penis in her mouth; then sat on him. She was about twenty. Max was dazed. When Louella did not return the following week and her name was never mentioned, he was sure they had been found out and she had been dismissed. But Louella had left town, planning her departure so well as to take all of her husband’s furniture with her, leaving him only the bed. She had knocked off Max as a gesture of significance, marking the end of a period she had come to find squalid and boring.