The Lost Language of Cranes: A Novel

by David Leavitt

  Sometimes Rose and Owen surprised themselves (and Philip) by revealing hidden capacities for pleasure. Near the end of the trip, they were staying at a motel in Half Moon Bay right near the ocean. Philip didn't remember why they were in such a giddy mood that night—whether they had decided to have wine with dinner for a change, or whether they were simply invigorated by the cool, gentle wind, the salt in their hair, the sound of the ocean outside their window. Whatever the reason, at ten or eleven that night they dragged him out of the chair in which he sat slumped, reading, and pulled him out the door with them and ran up and down the empty beach, Rose laughing, her shoes in her hand. At some point she ran through the water and shrieked at how cold the little waves felt, lapping her calves. Owen took him to the tidepools, and when he aimed the flashlight at the little lakes left by the tide, live things crawled and wriggled in the blinding brightness. A hermit crab crawled on Philip's hand, and he got to stick his finger inside the mouth of a sea anemone, which closed instantly around it. Even though the sea anemone was stuck to the rock, Owen explained, it was an animal, not a plant. It lived by digesting whatever was unlucky enough to fall into it. Worried, Philip pulled his finger out, and the thing writhed with loss. All along the beach, little clumps of light shone where groups of teenagers had lit campfires. "Hey, buddy! Want some grass?" they called, and Owen pushed Philip forward, toward Rose, who was still running along the lip of the ocean, her feet skipping the water like stones.

  Beyond the closed door to Philip's room a television was playing at a very low volume. Tiny gunshots rang out, followed by faint screams, the screeching of minuscule tires, bleating sirens. He assumed his mother was watching "The Rockford Files"—a show to which women of her generation seemed to be preternaturally addicted. The low volume, he knew, was for his benefit. He had fallen asleep on the floor, surrounded by his old books, and she did not want to wake him. Sometime during the course of the evening she had laid a blanket over him, stuffed a pillow under his head, and turned out the light. From this makeshift bed he watched the flickering of colored rays through the crack at the bottom of his door, and listened as the noises of violence gave way to the noises of domesticity—children in a commercial, joyful as carolers. "Cookies taste as good as Mom does," they seemed to be singing. Could he be hearing that right?

  He pushed away the blanket and shakily stood up. The tiny lights on the alarm clock pulsed blood-red in the darkness. It was 11:38. He turned on the light, shielding his eyes; but when he opened the door to the living room, the volume immediately increased. Rose was sitting on the sofa, watching, in fact, "Mannix," an empty cup on the floor next to her. When she saw Philip, she turned and smiled.

  "You fell asleep," she said.

  "I know," Philip answered. "It must have been all that nostalgia."

  "Would you like some tea?"

  "No thanks."

  He sat down next to her on the sofa. On the television, Mannix was interrogating a scared-looking housewife. "What's going on?" Philip asked.

  "Drug ring. Her husband is behind it. The big industrialist."

  "Isn't the big industrialist always behind it?"

  "More recently, but remember, this is 'Mannix.' It's 1969 so it’s not a cliché yet."

  "Aha."

  The windows, when he looked at them, were sheaths of black, shiny as patent leather. "Where's Dad?" Philip asked.

  "I don't know. He was supposed to be home by ten. But sometimes these things run late."

  "Did you find out anything more about the apartment, b the way?"

  A pained expression, quick as a shudder, passed over Rose's face, then was gone. "Most of the tenants seem to be all for it. Because they can buy their apartments and then resell them."

  "So you could do that too."

  "We'd have to get a loan first—but I don't want to burden you with this, Philip. It's not interesting."

  She took a walnut from the nutbowl, rolled it in her palm.

  "I think I'll stay here tonight, if you don't mind," Philip said. "It's so late already."

  "You know where the sheets are."

  "Yes. Mom, I wanted to tell you—"

  "Ssh!" Rose said. "Just a second." She bent over, focusing on the screen, where a man was running out of a house, past a swimming pool, onto a vast, green lawn. Another gunshot sounded.

  From where he sat, on the opposite end of the sofa, Philip moved closer to his mother. He tucked his feet under his legs.

  Cautiously, he let his head rest on her shoulder—so lightly only the tips of his hair touched her—then let himself sink in.

  Her dress smelled sweet, like apricots. Underneath him he could hear her breathing, the beating of her heart, a faint gurgling from her stomach. She did not take her eyes from the screen, but her hand came up gently from where it rested and stroked his head.

  "I wish we'd hear from your father," Rose said. "I hope he's all right."

  FOR GENERATIONS, the rich boys of the Upper East Side had called the Harte School "the prison" or "the tombs." The nickname had nothing to do with the degree of discipline imposed by the faculty, which was in general lenient; it referred, rather, to the blackened, doomed aspect of the building itself. From where it loomed over the F.D.R. Drive and the East River, the school resembled one of those orphanages which in Victorian novels are the site of unspeakable horrors perpetrated by gaunt, evil mistresses. Its elaborately carved railings and rows of high, thin windows, darkened by soot, suggested beatings, rats, polio in the water. There were rumors that the building exerted an evil influence. An alarming number of car accidents took place on the stretch of the F.D.R. Drive over which it cast its spindly shadows. Most of the residents of the slumbering German neighborhood in which the school stood went out of their way to walk around it, remarking what an eyesore it was. Even the local historical society described it apologetically, in its pamphlet guide to local architecture, as "an unfortunate experiment in Neo-Gothic revivalism."

  Given the imposing mythology that the school's architecture engendered, first-time visitors always found it a surprise, perhaps even a disappointment, to discover, as they entered the from doors, that the school's interior was quite ordinary, even pleasant. Carpeted hallways connected the high-ceilinged marble foyer with stairs, elevators, and classrooms. There were bowls of fresh flowers in niches in the stairwells, and a special bathroom with Laura Ashley print wallpaper for the female faculty and visiting mothers. There were no dimly lit garrets, no torn mattresses. Behind the school's spiderweb of wrought-iron grillwork lay small, well-lit classrooms filled with framed prints from the Museum of Modern Art, Apple Macintoshes, and high-resolution videocassette recorders.

  It was, in fact, the Harte boys themselves who took the greatest pleasure in "the prison's" hideous façade, and who were responsible for the wild rumors about their school that circulated at Browning, St. Bernard's, and Collegiate. New students—particularly mid-term arrivals whose parents had just moved to the city from Houston or California—were treated to the spurious legend of Jimmy O'Reilly, who had "disappeared" one afternoon in 1959 while cutting gym class, only to be found in the boiler room six months later, his body decomposed and half-eaten by rats. Afterwards, the initiate would be taken on a harrowing tout of the school's labyrinthine basements during which he would be conveniently "lost" in a dark, windowless room below the gymnasium. After a while, if the boy screamed enough, he'd be let free. Halloween at the Harte School was, needless to say, a favorite and calamitous holiday. Boys arrived in class with hatchets buried in their heads, dripping blood, or with a third eye in the middle of their foreheads. Sometimes they terrorized the girls at St. Eustacia down the street, invading their locker rooms dressed as the living dead. The St. Eustacia girls were noted for their obtuseness and cowardice, but they were also, in general, larger and stronger than the Harte boys, and on more than one occasion little Harters came crawling back from these afternoon revels with black eyes, real blood mingling with the ketchup they had poured onto thei
r shirts.

  Philip was twelve when Owen started working at Harte. Up until that time he had attended an obscure, modest co-ed school on the West Side. When Owen took the job at the much more expensive and prestigious Harte, it was as much for Philip's sake as for his own; indeed, the waiving of his son's tuition was one of the chief lures with which the Harte administration drew Owen. But Philip hated Harte. He complained to Rose that he didn't fit in there, that the boys called him names and gave him funny looks. He found their tough, rich-boy cockiness scary, the way they stood in clusters on the stairs in their expensive sweaters and trenchcoats, smoking and hitting each other on the shoulders. They called one another by their last names, and some of those names were famous, recognizable. To make matters worse, Philip had not yet entered puberty and was scrawnier and younger-looking than most of the robust Harte boys. Of course, he realized later, a lot of his contempt and fear had to do with the fact that their camaraderie, their genial physicalness with one another (and his exclusion from it) generated in him such intense erotic longings. From the distance of the teased, Philip fell in love first with Sam Shaeffer, then with Jim Steinmetz and Christian Sullivan, though he never admitted it. Soon he could not bear it anymore. At Christmas break, he told his parents he wouldn't go back. When they asked him what he intended to do instead, he produced a folder of catalogues from other city schools and announced that he had chosen a co-educational academy on the West Side which resembled a giant television set and which was noted for its progressive educational methods. His friend Gerard was already going there and he loved it. Then Owen asked Philip where he expected the money to come from, and Philip's eyes widened, his lower lip shook.

  "Owen!" Rose said then. "Can't you see how miserable he is? My God, all year he's been foundering. If Harte's not right for him, it's just not right for him. I'll pay his tuition, for God's sake, I'll take on extra freelancing, but it's not fair of you to make him stay there just so your reputation doesn't get hurt!"

  Owen didn't answer her. The truth, although he wasn't about to admit it, was that the Harte School inspired in him the same fear and self-doubt that made Philip so desperately want to leave it. He felt isolated from the faculty, who were all rheumatic old men, intense young women from Seven Sisters colleges, effusive, aging homosexuals. (Owen never connected himself with this third group.) The parents, whom as director of admissions he was required to face and console daily, treated him with an almost imperceptible noblesse oblige, as if his status as a member of the underclass, a Jew, a servant, was something to be taken for granted.

  He decided that if he could not achieve his own liberation from Harte, the least he could do was abet Philip's. The next fall, with Owen's sanction, Philip began at Riverside Preparatory Academy, from which he graduated, four years later, with highest honors. In fact, Owen paid most of the tuition; he wasn't about to let Rose kill herself with the extra freelancing. At Philip's graduation, he stood with Rose and watched as his son, full-grown and handsome now, took his diploma and with what seemed to Owen uncharacteristic exuberance threw an overblown, Eva Peron-style kiss to the world at large. He hoped that someday Philip would recognize how he had loved him—quietly, and from a distance—and appreciate all the unspoken ways in which his lather, from behind the scenes and without ever making overt claims, had watched and sympathized and protected him, and perhaps made his life better. But the love of a silent father, he knew from experience, was hard to appreciate, even for the most empathetic son. The truth was, he was afraid that if he got too close to his son, things might rub off on Philip—things he preferred not to name. Thus the distance between them grew rather than shrank, as Philip got older. There was no tension, no suppressed anxiety; there was just miles and miles of nothing. And that was as it should be. For if they had been closer, then, if Philip ever found out the truth about Owen, he'd have interpreted his father's affection as something sick, something perverse. But if there was no overt affection, if he stayed at a distance—well, then what could Philip accuse him of? Only of staying at a distance. And there was nothing ignoble in that.

  Owen remained at Harte for years, far longer than he'd intended. Because he received more parents than any other administrator, he was given an office that was slightly larger and better-situated than those of his coworkers. He had a new oak desk and three windows, and a whole wall where diplomas (including his Ph.D., prominently displayed at the principal's request) hung alongside pristine black-and-white photographs of Harte boys hard at work in a chemistry lab, laughing on the playground, looking up at a teacher, their eyes misty with knowledge. These photographs, mounted on thick Styrofoam and handsomely framed, were extremely well posed fakes. The chemistry lab in question had never taken place. The photographer had set up the beakers and titration tubes in an arrangement she considered aesthetic and said to the boys, "Okay, now look fascinated. That's right. Good." They had done so obediently. If Upper East Side children knew anything at all, it was how to simulate pleasure for pictures. And though he was often tempted, Owen never revealed this tiny fraud to the parents who huddled over his desk, begging him to divulge their sons' chances at admission. Instead, he took out lists and statistical charts that showed how many Ivy League colleges would accept their sons, and what wonderful grades they would make at them, and what law firms and advertising firms and investment banking firms would employ them, should they be lucky enough to be among the select few admitted to Harte. The parents scrutinized the statistics, nodded. Usually he did not have to sell too hard. It was the parents who had to sell, and sometimes the children themselves. "I realize Greg's S.S.A.T. scores aren't the greatest, but he's got so much imagination and energy," mothers told him. "He started reading very young. He's always saying the wittiest things to company." Fathers boasted about their sons' intuitive know-how, the entrepreneurial instincts they displayed in starting businesses to deliver videotapes from the local rental shop to other residents of the building. The boys themselves arrived in his office well scrubbed and well trained. "Why do I want to go to the Harte School?" they would ask, carefully repeating Owen's question in order to give themselves time to remember. "Because I believe its combination of tradition and innovation in educational methodology would be consonant with my personal ethical system."

  Hundreds of them passed through Owen's office; sat across from him, cowed and intimidated in their stiff black suits. Owen, himself dressed in a stiff black suit, sometimes had to fight the impulse to laugh at the ridiculousness of his position; that he, a grown man with a Ph.D. in comparative literature, was being paid to frighten little boys. Usually he flashed a smile to console them after the first five minutes. Sometimes he remained stern and watched their shoulders tighten. It was easy to cut past the spiel their parents had prepared for them. He liked to get them talking about what they liked, whether it was the Hardy Boys or chess tournaments or Twisted Sister. Some of them had long hair they had clearly refused to cut. Others had no instinct for rebellion and seemed eager to follow in the footsteps of their parents, to become exactly what would make everyone in their families most relieved and happy. Those were the boys Owen liked the least.

  Sometimes he wondered what all those parents would think of him if they knew the truth about him. Already, when their sons were accepted, their attitude imperceptibly changed. Their original smugness returned, and they treated him with the same patronizing glibness that they lavished upon the faculty; now that they had gotten what they needed from him, there was no need to kowtow to this middle-class Jew. Sitting in his office across from a scared little boy, the door closed, he often pondered the implicit sexuality of the interview, which was somewhere between a rape and a seduction. The candidate was obliged to make himself as attractive as possible to the interviewer; the interviewer was expected to terrorize and dominate the candidate. If they found out about him, Owen quickly decided, the Harte parents would demand his resignation immediately, figuring that if he hadn't already, it was only a matter of time before he went
off the deep end and started taking advantage of their desperate little boys, many of whom had been promised cars and computers if they got into Harte and might have done just about am thing to get them. Which was doubly ironic, since Owen was not in the least attracted to boys and had little sympathy for men who were. His own taste ran to very masculine men with chiseled faces and hairy chests, although it was something of a joke to claim he had any "taste" in men at all. He knew which images on a screen or in a magazine excited him; that was all. None of it seemed to have much to do with reality, with the possible exception of Winston Penn, the new English teacher, whose blond hair and strong-jawed face and wire-rimmed glasses had more than once found their way into Owen's masturbatory second life. He liked Winston Penn, liked his slow, careful voice, liked his sweater-vests and bow ties. But he could never approach Winston Penn, except as a colleague. He had learned early on, in prep school, how much it hurt to grow close to men who would never return that closeness.

  It was now ten-thirty on a Tuesday night, and Owen was sitting in his office, in the dark, alone, fingering a very creased piece of paper the numbers on which had long since been worn past legibility. No matter; he had them memorized. The scrap was a totem. Earlier this evening he had delivered to a group of prospective Harte parents a speech so familiar to him that he joked to Rose he could give it on automatic pilot. As he talked, his mind moved in other directions, in circles, endlessly recombining the two sets of seven digits and their letter equivalents, creating anagrams, creating a language.