by Lee Siegel
But in my eyes, the lack of social recognition was a blessing. My integrity, the way I saw it, came to depend on my ability to keep my exceptional gifts away from the tawdry currents of the transactional world. Out there my gifts would be held under scrutiny, They would be compared with the actions and accomplishments of other, dissimilar people. So long as my gifts went unrecognized, they remained unchallenged. So long as I did not have to test them, I would never doubt their existence.
* * *
Mr. Crostini, the guidance counselor, stood up and came out from behind his desk to welcome me into his office. His gesture would have reassured me if he had not walked with such impatience. After showing me in, he held his door open as he leaned with his hand on the doorknob and said to the two or three other boys waiting to see him on plastic chairs outside his office: I’ll just be a minute. As I passed by him, I smelled his breath. It was stale from the menthol cigarettes that he chain-smoked.
He sat behind his large wooden desk and lit another cigarette. Exhaling, he leaned back in his high leather chair with his hands joined behind his head. Since he was in his early forties, the lock of hair that fell over his forehead seemed less boyish and more a piece of his past that he had, with the same impatience, allowed to remain. He was wearing a light brown corduroy sport jacket that was starting to loosen and bulge from overuse.
He glanced at some papers in an open manila folder that lay before him. It was my dossier. He was not upbeat about my future. Though my English classes were in the A range, my grade point average was between a B and a C. It was unfortunate, he said matter-of-factly, that I did not seem very conscientious about school. He smiled to himself and shook his head.
I began to talk faster. To my surprise, I wanted him to know that I was more than the sum of the cold facts in my file. I wanted him to know that there was something more to me than the lackluster student who cut class occasionally, handed in unremarkable homework, and lacked enthusiasm for his classes. I became indignant about being reduced to what people thought they knew about me from the way I behaved; I wanted him to know that my true meaning lay in all the experiences I was going through; this, I believed, made my inner life more valuable than what mere grades proved—
Dear Mr. Crostini:
We met in your office forty years ago. I hope that you are still alive and, if you are, that you are as well as can be expected.
Forgive the delay in writing to you, but I would like to amplify the remarks I made to you that afternoon in 1975, in hopes of correcting a mistaken impression that you may have had of me.
You seem to have derived from what you believed were my laziness, irresponsibility, and insolent gestures a judgment of me as possessing average to below-average intelligence and creativity. But what you perceived as laziness and irresponsibility was, in reality, a paralysis of the will, induced by a lack of confidence, itself caused by a breakdown in parental authority, which in turn was the product of a confluence of characterological and circumstantial factors that might or might not have had the same unfortunate effects in a different social and economic arrangement.
My paralysis in school was actually the result of an incredible number of projects that I was involved in outside the regular curriculum. If it is not too late, please add to my file these extramural activities, all of which consisted of my attempts to accumulate sufficient confidence to permit myself to accept a place in the always-room-for-one-more honeycomb of social relations:
• Driving recklessly and fast, which offered escape from a tempestuous home life, provided an efficient and, so long as I maintained control of the car, violence-free outlet for fantasies of power, compensated for a sense of inertia, and developed poise in stressful situations.
• Seeking out, in traditional heterosexual adolescent fashion, girls—a vital aspect of socialization that, in my case, acquired a particular urgency in light of my father’s personal admission to me of his sexual impotence, and my mother’s efforts to seduce me; please note that these efforts were unsuccessful.
• Drinking excessive and, in some cases, stupefying amounts of alcohol, a rigorously structured undertaking that moderated my anger, eased debilitating levels of tension, and enabled me, before vomiting or passing out, to envision myself in situations in which responsibility, piety, stability, selflessness, and self-respect constituted the hallmarks of my personality.
• Going to extreme lengths to entertain people and make them laugh: an exercise in masochism and self-hatred that indicated a commitment to public service, as well as demonstrating a desire to act beyond my own narrow self-interest.
In short, you misjudged me. I am well aware that this is a common error, not just in your line of endeavor but in many professions where time constraints and daunting logistics make the rapid and therefore incomplete appraisal of a person unavoidable. Then, too, who can see into someone’s inner depths, or future?
Still, if I may say so, it is small misperceptions like these that can sometimes have the effect of preventing an individual from reaching his or her full potential. You yourself, had you perhaps been the beneficiary of a more nuanced approach as a youth, might have gone on, not to squander your distinctive skills in the role of high school guidance counselor responsible for steering in the right direction teenagers whose bold defiance was in inverse proportion to their lostness and meekness, but to reach your full potential as, for example, a bookkeeper for a drug cartel.
Thank you very much for your time. Please be assured that I harbor no hard feelings against you. Decades of experience have taught me that we do the best we can with what we are given. I hope you have a wonderful day.
Sincerely,
Mr. Crostini closed my folder and stood up. Apply to William Paterson, he said. You have a good chance of getting in. Stretching out his hand over his desk, he wished me luck.
* * *
Located in the white, lower-middle-class suburb of Wayne, New Jersey, William Paterson College was a state college known as a school for jocks and for kids who wanted to enter trades like construction and landscaping. In an earlier time, they would not have needed a college degree to pursue the work they wanted, or had to settle for. Nearly all the students desired jobs in some corner of commerce, or on the lower slopes of finance.
What I expected from college was not available at William Paterson. My mother had gone to Hunter and my father never went to college. I believed I deserved better. To my mind, my intimate connection to books and my grades in English proved it. After my boredom in high school, and the commotion at home, I wanted college to be a transformative experience. Even the kids from modest economic backgrounds like mine put together enough loans and financial aid to attend a good private college. Paul was going to Drew University in Madison, though staying in New Jersey, close to my parents, was out of the question. I wanted an elevated intellectual adventure and complete emotional independence. After being in Mr. Crostini’s office, I was no longer content to thrive in secret.
I sent away to William Paterson for its catalogs anyway. I would segue from one passionate certitude to another, and my certainty that Crostini was underestimating me quickly gave way to my certainty that he was looking out for my best interests.
* * *
The tired categories high school imposed on even the most exciting subjects numbed me. By contrast, the idea of an entire semester devoted to a subject in philosophy or literature seemed the embodiment of the freedom I had been seeking. The very facts of a “semester” and of the complete immersion into a single area of culture made higher education seem like an end in itself.
But that was not what I found, devouring the catalogs as if they were prospectuses of an afterlife. The courses were few, and superficial. Subjects I prized, such as philosophy, were barely represented. There was a great emphasis on fulfilling requirements, graduating, and getting out.
Worst of all, Paterson was a commuter school. That meant that I would not have the four years I had been counting on as an Ely
sian break in the speeding space-time continuum of one worldly obligation after another. College, for me, had nothing to do with laying the groundwork for a career. I didn’t see it as the next stage in the evolution of a life. I considered it nothing less than a salvation.
I rejected William Paterson as a possibility, and also other state schools, such as Montclair, Glassboro, and Ramapo. Rutgers, New Jersey’s premier state university, seemed like a place that might fulfill my expectations of enlightenment and expanded meaningfulness. But it was too close to home.
* * *
My mother didn’t want me staying in New Jersey, either. She was planning to divorce my father. After that, she expected Angelo to come live with her. Since he would be bringing along his three children, and my brother was still in junior high, there would be no space for me. Shedding a few tears of self-sacrifice, my mother had already told me that I was free to take my beloved Ethan Allen desk, chair, and hutch with me to whatever college I chose, so long as I could find the money to transport them.
My living nearby but in a dormitory, or in a room off campus, was also not palatable to her. We fought all the time. The mere sight of me seemed to provoke in her unfulfilled longings, or past resentments, or unfinished business with my father. In college she saw a legitimate opportunity to send me away. She appeased her conscience by reassuring me that a state school was beneath my gifts.
My father joined in urging me to attend a distant school. He was living in a rented room in a private home in a nearby town. Somehow he had managed to find another job in real estate. Sobered up for the moment by events, robbed of the marriage and the home that had permitted him to fantasize about a future that was rapidly slipping away from him, he did not want me to see him flailing in his reduced circumstances.
He did not have to worry about that. I refused to visit him in his room because I knew that seeing him there would have crushed me.
* * *
My parents could not afford to pay for my college education. My mother had been unable to find a position as a full-time teacher. She was getting by on a combination of her income as a substitute and the money my father was sending her as stipulated by their divorce settlement. My father’s new job at a real estate firm paid a rudimentary salary—no draw this time—and seemed to be, from what my mother told me, a temporary situation. After the money he sent my mother, he had just enough left over to satisfy his own needs.
Since even the tuition at a state university would have been beyond their means, my parents were indifferent to whether I attended a public or a private school. They were too distracted by their own more urgent predicaments. They automatically assumed that I would fulfill their middle-class expectation that their children would go on to four years of higher education. My mother, the child of immigrants, and my father, the product of a household driven into economic despair by the death of his own father, regarded college for their sons to be as much a staple of their existence as a car—though my mother would soon change her tune about that, as about so many things. Thanks to student loans and financial aid, a private college that was a few thousand dollars a year more than a state school was within reach. I would simply have to take out more loans for a private college. And a private college was what I wanted. I did not want college to be a perfunctory step forward.
In those pre-Internet days, I sent away to about a dozen of the most affordable liberal arts colleges for catalogs. Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois, came closest to satisfying my expectations. It was almost one thousand miles away, for one thing. For another, the midwestern school offered one of the few undergraduate degrees in journalism. My passion for words, my desire to use them as levers to change my place in the world, and a TV show about heroic magazine writers called The Name of the Game had made me resolve to become a journalist. Most important of all, considering my checkered performance in high school, Bradley had one of the highest acceptance rates among small private colleges.
It never occurred to me that visiting the college was a necessary step for seriously considering it. The idea of travel was too remote for that to be an option. Neither of my parents had the money to afford to fly to Peoria with me. Both of them were too depressed to drive with me there, or to take me to Bradley in some other, less expensive way. Even if they had mustered enough spirit to do so, my father was too nervous about losing another job to take any time off, and my mother could not afford to miss too many days of teaching. As for me, I was as unconcerned about a practical convention like exploring the university where you were thinking of spending the next four years of your life as I was about the basic facts of science. If I had been told that Peoria was in a different time zone, I would have been surprised to hear it.
The day Bradley’s letter of acceptance arrived, I was stunned. It was the first time that something of great worth, something that I had imagined embracing me, became a reality.
The one catch was, as my mother reminded me, that I would have to work my way through school. But this didn’t faze me. I had been exchanging labor for money since I was a child.
“The Tale of the Four Quarters”
My best friend, Matthew Cassidy, and I arrived at the Adlers’ with rakes in hand. We had come straight from Stony Lane elementary school, walking along a small wooden bridge over a shallow stream. A crossing guard wearing a blue uniform with gold buttons shepherded us across a busy avenue. She snapped at anyone who lingered as they crossed or stopped to say hello to her. A short, mild, introspective boy, Matthew was a Beatles fan. He sang their songs softly to himself as we walked (“I’ll buy you a diamond ring my friend / If it makes you feel all right…”).
We reached the Adlers’ yard. There were dead and dying leaves everywhere. They were brilliant and beautiful, but they were rotting. We could smell their decaying sweetness as we worked. Our job was to rake the leaves into piles and then to press the piles with our hands into large black plastic bags. After that, we had to leave the bags on the curb in front of the Adlers’ light blue split-level house. The garbage truck would come and take them away to be incinerated.
On our way to the Adlers’, we passed Matthew’s house. Painted a rustic red, the tiny cottage sat just across the street from the bridge as we walked off it. The red cottage was full of the sound of laughter and the smell of good food. Matthew’s father, Donald, a short Irishman with damp, laughing eyes, had grown up in the city, in Hell’s Kitchen. Violet, his mother, was a large Italian American woman who spent the morning watching television and cooked in a happy trance during the afternoon. Matthew loved them, and they loved him.
Matthew, his parents, and his sister, Kathy, were Catholic. They were initiates, as Matthew recounted to me, in the mysteries of confession, where horrendous sins were forgiven in a cadence of ancient words. I was drawn in a spell of fascination to this idea of mercy triumphing over justice. In the rite of communion, Matthew said, the hammered and battered body of Christ became transformed into white wafers and red wine. Mercy and the healing of wounded matter seemed to me to be at the magical heart of Matthew’s religion.
On top of that mystery was another one: Matthew’s father took the bus every morning from Paramus to New York, where he worked in the silver-spired Empire State Building. His face glowing, Matthew boasted to me about his father’s accomplishments as an architect. He was responsible for several skyscrapers in the city, Matthew explained, glowing and blushing. Matthew would sometimes draw the tall buildings for me in his gold-spiraled notebook when we were in school.
Originally a collection of celery farms, Paramus began to flourish after the Second World War. Lying only seventeen miles from New York City, it offered an ideal commute, especially to veterans returning from Europe and Japan in triumph, and then from Korea. Those who were not too shattered to begin a promising new life could afford Paramus’s modest tract houses with the help of the GI Bill. That was how my father, a veteran of the Korean War, came to buy our split-level house in 1961.
Many of the town
’s residents worked in the shopping malls and in the stores that lined the highways. I found positions as a stock boy and then a salesman in the department stores. That was where I worked part-time during my last two years of high school. My first real job was as a stock boy at Alexander’s, a giant department store on Route 4 that catered to low-income people who mostly visited from the poorer sections of New York City. If they had the money for the commute, they could purchase attractive clothes of inferior quality.
The store sported a mural, at the time perhaps the largest public mural in the world, on its facade. A Polish artist named Stefan Knapp, who was sent to a Siberian gulag as a young man in Poland after Stalin’s agents murdered his father, had been commissioned by the store’s owner, George Farkas, to paint it.
In the Soviet prison colony Knapp nearly starved to death. After being released from the gulag, as a result of an agreement between Poland and the Soviet Union, he fought in the RAF. He stayed in London after the war. Eventually he took up painting public murals. He flourished and became something of a celebrity. Life magazine did a spread on him, using photographs of him constructing the Alexander’s mural. He slid on skis from one end of the giant mural to another. In the photographs, he looks cheerful and robust.
Farkas, an admirer and collector of modernist painting, had envisioned a work of art that would please rich and poor, educated and uneducated, sophisticated people and people with simple tastes. But the finished product, a giant rectangular painting that appeared on the front of the store in 1962, did not have the universal appeal Farkas had hoped for.
To some people, the masses of primary colors resembled an uplifting map of the world, in which the familiar continents existed in a harmony of form and content. To others, the mural was a horrifying mess about to liquefy and collapse into sheets of multicolored lava that would crush the crowds of people below with vicious force. The residents of Paramus sat around their kitchen tables arguing about whether, in an ideal situation, the town authorities should allow the mural to remain or remove it on the pretext that the eyesore repelled people passing through town who otherwise might have stopped and visited the stores.