One night in East Meadow, talking with new neighbors over coffee about his affection for guns, George recollected how he used to take Carol to Coney Island during their courtship and spend most of his time there on the rifle range, plinking away with a .22. And when he had been in the merchant marine, he enjoyed especially the port of Balitmore, because at shooting galleries there it was legal to use pistols—something forbidden in New York.
One of the neighbors made George an invitation. “Then why don’t you join our pistol team?” George’s reaction was puzzlement. As a native New Yorker he knew of the city’s severe Sullivan Law. He had always assumed that private citizens could not own a pistol. “I thought they were taboo,” he said. “I thought only crooks could get one. I come from the city, where nobody you know has one.”
Dave, the neighbor, assured George that obtaining a pistol permit was easy, provided there was nothing sinister in his background. “As far as I know, I’m clean,” answered George. “I’ve never been in jail.” Then all that was necessary was for George to shoot qualifying rounds at the local club for a few months, during which the police would check out his background.
From his first night on the firing range, with headsets on to muffle the noise of fire up and down the line, target shooting was to become, as George often put it, “my joy.” He entered competition enthusiastically, believing at the outset that his military training and the many evenings he had spent at shooting galleries would stand him in good stead for experience. But George quickly learned that target shooting in competition was a different matter. It requires, he told Richie, practice at least once a week if not more, intense concentration, even good physical and mental health. “A man can’t fire a pistol well if his mind is all cluttered up. You stand there,” he explained, “fifty feet from the target. There are ten men on a team, but only the top four firers count in scoring against another team. You go from slow time, which is ten shots in ten minutes, to fast time, ten shots in twenty seconds, to rapid fire, ten shots in ten seconds.”
“Can you do like this?” Richie asked, whipping out an imaginary pistol and firing like a hired gun.
George laughed and shook his head. “That’s only on Gunsmoke,” he said. He attempted to interest his son in target shooting on a junior competitive level, but Richie showed no interest.
The first year George scored poorly. But he was, if anything, a man as stubborn as a terrier, and in the years that followed, he became one of the most skilled members of the Levittown Rod and Gun Club. One season he won most of the medals. He was known as a superb marksman, a cool shooter who could hit what he wanted to hit—quickly, efficiently, dead center.
The first gun he bought when his permit came through from the police department was a .25 Colt automatic. “She was a little gun from the Prohibition era, they used to call them stocking guns because ladies carried them,” George once said, for he remembered every detail of every gun he had ever owned. “She was a beautiful piece of work,” he went on, usually using the feminine gender to describe his weapons. Later there was a .45 that he bought from a government surplus store, but during one of the financially lean times in East Meadow George sold it for thirty-five dollars to help make a mortgage payment.
One weapon for which he held great hopes was a .38 special that he bought for thirty dollars from a friend. It was the kind of gun favored by most New York City policemen. The original owner had been a doctor who took exquisite care of it, and George’s intention was to use the five-chambered gun in competition, even though its barrel was only two inches long instead of the preferred four inches. To his annoyance, George discovered that because he had a small hand, the gun was difficult to handle. He could not cock, aim, and fire quickly enough in competition. A friend offered to buy it, but George decided against selling. He believed strongly in what he called “the Constitutional guarantee a citizen has to bear arms.” In the closet the gun went, quickly available should the safety of George Diener’s household be threatened.
Chapter Six
Richie was never really happy in the new home on Longfellow Avenue. When the Dieners first moved there in 1965, one boy of Richie’s age lived on the block, and the two struck up a brief friendship. But when he moved away, there were only girls left in the neighborhood. Quickly they discovered Richie’s temper, his embarrassment over his weight. At twelve, he was not quite five feet tall and an overweight one hundred pounds. Two girls of twelve or thirteen, chubby themselves and with raucous voices, took to springing out at Richie from behind bushes and shrieking “Fatso!” until he would rail at them and chase them home—he blustering and tearful, they angry and threatening vengeance.
Richie set out to explore the area in search of friendship, though he would never have admitted that was the reason. He soon discovered it was the custom of the neighborhood boys to scowl at alien faces. One day George idly asked his son why he looked so fearsome as a youth passed their yard. “Do you know that kid?” said George. Richie shook his head negatively. “Then why did you look at him that way?”
“I just don’t like his looks,” said Richie.
“How can you have friends if you act that way?” Richie had no response. He went inside to tend his animals.
Richie’s lack of friends was becoming a matter of concern to Carol, although George insisted she was worrying unnecessarily. Privately George marveled at the many similarities between himself and his son. Were so many common traits passed on in the biology of his seed, or did a father unknowingly, unwantingly mold a child in his own image, a child who was so obviously lonely, who found solace in animals, who was so quick to raise his fists to defend his identity?
Both parents made continuing attempts to correct their son’s unhappy social existence. But nothing worked well. Though she still remained busy in her work with retarded children, Carol took over as den mother of a Cub Scout pack, hoping that her role would have some status value for Richie. But the pack’s membership, small when Carol became leader, declined even further. Families moved away. There were not enough boys of required age in the district. Meetings in their home were often disrupted by Russell, who had put aside the piercing cries of his infancy and was thunderingly embarked on his hyperactive assault on life. “I take the blame for the pack’s failing,” says Carol. “Richie didn’t like it, and I can see why.”
Throughout Richie’s preadolescent years, Carol attempted to build his ego. Clever and imaginative in sewing, she fashioned elaborate masquerade costumes for Halloween and school parties. There are photographs of Richie as a solemn but plump French courtier, as a stout Argentine gaucho, as a well-fed visitor from outer space. He usually won first prize, but that was not enough in the cruel competition of childhood society. Nor were the fancy birthday parties Carol planned for him. “You’re incredible,” remarked Carol’s sister, June, who had a son older than Richie and a daughter the same age as him. “I consider it well done if I buy a cake and have pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey.” Carol dreamed up “theme” affairs, baking her own cake, carrying out motifs in table decorations and games and gifts.
George continued his weekend outings with Richie. Talk of nature remained their principal area of communication, and George happily bought scuba equipment and told his son that someday there would be a boat, or a camper, or both. In later years he would become both a leader in a Boy Scout troop—although Richie did not join—and an assistant coach for a Little League team, this time for his second son, not his first.
Richie had no interest in sports. Although he would lose his hated fat by the time he was fourteen and develop into a strong and well-muscled lad, he had not the slightest enthusiasm for athletic competition. He neither watched sports events on television nor read of them in the newspaper. Carol tried now and then to interest her son in sport, for she felt he would find friends in the camaraderie of a team. “Why don’t you try out for baseball?” she’d suggest. Or wrestling, for he had strong arms and well-developed chest muscles. Or football, for despite
his stockiness he could run like a forest animal. “I don’t want to,” Richie answered. “If I made a mistake out there and caused the team to lose, I don’t think I could stand it.”
Carol nodded and dropped the subject. Until that moment she had not realized the extent of her son’s insecurity.
Richie’s development as a loner did not entirely dominate the thoughts and lives of George and Carol. Despite the boy’s moodiness, his middling grades, his flashes of temper and belligerence, his scraps on the school playground, he was, in sum, a satisfying, often affectionate, seemingly mostly normal youth. There were moments when Carol wanted to go into her neighborhood and tell the young people about her son and bring them home to be his friends, but such moments passed. It was easier to take the attitude, as mothers usually do, that Richie would outgrow his childhood pain, that the years would heal, that opportunities would come, that friends would soon be there. Every other mother she talked to had problems at home. They were almost typical in suburbia, she told herself, as if mumps and measles came and went, only to be replaced by stealing, dope, and violence—all of which she had heard of and none of which, mercifully, had touched her son.
Moreover, Richie seemed to have what most children his age did not—a direction. His deep interest in nature and animals continued to expand to the extent that Carol announced at dinner one evening that she felt she was dwelling in the middle of the Bronx Zoo. By the time Richie was twelve, he owned a thriving menagerie. For a time, a skunk named Cologne, a gift from Grandfather Ring, coexisted in the backyard with a tremendous gray rabbit named Thumper. It was Richie’s intent to prove that different species could live compatibly in the same condition. But as the skunk grew elderly, it became hostile and snappish. Sadly Richie gave him away to the Frank Buck Zoo on Long Island. “This proves that my mistake was in raising Cologne in a pen,” Richie told his mother. “If he had been brought up inside like a puppy, he would have learned to act like a house animal.”
The family of backyard squirrels that had so enchanted Richie on the first day he saw the yellow house multiplied and grew almost tame under his gamekeeping. The animals waited patiently for Richie to come home from school, knowing that he would feed them with cookies.
When a neighbor across the street threatened to have other squirrels shot because they were breaking the branches of her trees, Richie came up with a better idea. He took his Have-a-Heart trap, so called because it was able to capture small animals without seriously hurting them, and set it daily at the foot of the trees. Every afternoon for more than a week, Richie caught a squirrel and took it to a nearby forest.
From their field trips or from an East Meadow pet shop, George and Richie often brought home snakes of all varieties and installed them in pens. The grass snakes Carol did not mind, not even the pine snake. But the yellow rat snake, with its striking markings, grew melancholv and temperamental, unresponsive to Richie’s ministrations, so much so that Carol suggested the creature be returned to nature. Richie read up on its natural habitat. Discovering that the species is indigenous to Maryland, Richie took the snake along on a family automobile trip to North Carolina, where Carol’s parents had moved in retirement, near several golf courses where Mr. Ring played daily. Richie watched out the car window for a likely place, finally calling out for his father to stop. Somewhat sadly, Richie carried his snake to a brushy, rocky area, opened the box, and watched the pet slither away.
But, as she did with most things, Carol accommodated herself, even to the milk snake that, when dead of natural causes, was autopsied by George and Richie. They studied its innards and discussed possible causes of death. Then the skin went up on Richie’s wall.
The boy’s prize serpent was a boa constrictor purchased in infancy and carefully raised until it grew to be almost five feet long. Carol insisted, firmly, that this pet stay forever in Richie’s room, in a secure cage. Richie obeyed, except for moments when he would appear at the dinner table with the boa draped about his neck, or when he would set the creature free in the kitchen and encourage it to glide into the dining room as Carol and George entertained neighbors with coffee and cake. The boa disappeared one day and, despite a thorough search of house, basement, and yard, was never found. Richie never told his parents that he had secretly taken the snake to a forest and let it go, perhaps relishing the mystery of a giant serpent haunting his parents’ house.
By coincidence, Carol had a cousin by marriage who worked as a herpetologist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. She telephoned and asked if Richie could visit her at work, explaining the boy’s extraordinary interest in reptiles. Several times Richie was allowed to go to the museum, to private rooms in the research area where snakes were grown and studied. After each trip he returned to East Meadow with great enthusiasm. He explained to his counselor in junior high that he had decided to become a herpetologist. “The funny thing, Mother,” he told Carol, “is that the counselor doesn’t even know what a herpetologist is. He doesn’t even know how to spell it!”
But going to New York City was a major undertaking for Richie, involving an expensive train ticket, or a full day for George or Carol of driving in and waiting and driving back. It simply could not be done as often as Richie would have wanted. If the Dieners had lived in the city, instead of an hour away in the suburbs that George had so passionately solicited for his family, perhaps Richie could have worked part-time at the museum, or at least had easier access. That “if,” that “perhaps” were but two of the hundred others that Carol would someday remember, endure, and put away.
Suddenly George was forty. “The big four-oh,” he said to himself as he shaved. Carol baked a cake, there were cards and gifts from family and friends on a geriatric theme. The evening passed pleasantly enough, but inside George was a gale as disquieting as those that shook him during his first weeks at sea. Introspection was not a word in George’s vocabulary, but on this night he was deep within himself. He took stock of what, materially, his forty years had wrought. The inventory was brief:
One good house with three hundred monthly mortgage payments yet to fill and then it would be his and not the bank’s. One secondhand car—could he ever afford a new one, one that another man had not first used? One portable, above-the-ground backyard swimming pool, value $400. Too costly, of course, but the children enjoyed it, and George liked the music of their laughter on long summer nights. One color television and six rooms of furniture, nothing elegant, but all paid for. George was comfortable in his living room, for Carol had decorated it in the colors of autumn in a forest—green pebble wall-to-wall carpet, Danish modern sofa and chairs in rust and gold. There were two large imitation oil paintings above the sofa, the kind found on motel walls, but they celebrated an imaginary landscape where man had not intruded on the mountains and the seas. The room was relentlessly middle-class, George knew that, and it did not approach the fancy decor with knickknacks that Carol’s sister possessed across town. But he knew the slightly shabby, impeccably clean room somehow reflected him; it was the best he could do.
What else is there? George wondered this night. One company insurance policy on his life, one mortgage insurance policy on his life, but nothing personal to mark his financial importance to his family and his world. Perhaps $200 in the savings account. There was never more than $200. Even the $1,500 inheritance that Carol had received from her grandmother seemed to disappear as suddenly as it had come. Was $200 the ceiling God had put on him?
Of course there was his job; after fifteen years with the same company he was not likely to lose that. But he still plowed the same row, took the same spices out of the trunk of his car and put them in the same racks in the same grocery stores. Occasionally there would be a new product, a gravy mix, a white sauce packet to introduce, but this was the sum of his daily endeavor. George was a resident of Willy Loman country. The world did not and would not shake as he passed by.
His health? There George could take pride, even on a night when his life was ha
lf over. He did not smoke, not like Carol who puffed and coughed her way through at least two packs a day. Rarely did he drink, a glass of sweet New York State white wine when Carol loaded his table with lasagna and ravioli and the exquisite cheesecake she fashioned and baked in a springform pan. Occasionally he took a weak whiskey at one of her charity affairs. But alcohol meant nothing to him. The small cart beside the dining-room table contained bottles purchased chiefly for friends who dropped by. If he never took another drink, it would matter nothing to him. Never had a major illness felled him, and he was sure that one reason was his abstinence from pills and medication. He did not believe in putting foreign substances in his body. He kept it tough and sharp. Thirty push-ups a day on a wheel to keep the belly trim, this on top of the weights he lifted fifty times each morning, standing, crouching, and lying on his back. He kept his weights and exercise wheel under one end of the living-room couch, next to the American flag that stood in the corner, ready for the occasions when George proudly attached it to his front porch.
He could still climb a pine tree; he could still dazzle the children at the charity’s summer picnic by standing on the bathhouse roof and leaping prodigiously across a chain-link fence into the deep end of the swimming pool. Someday he was going to take skydiving lessons. Why not? He was still young. “Like the man says,” George said, “Life begins at forty.”
Richie Page 5