King of Cards

by Ward, Robert

  He had been an artist before they met, a watercolorist of some talent. (Even now I had two of his early paintings on my apartment walls.) His dream had been to go to New York. My mother told me he talked of nothing else when they first met. But being poor and not well connected, he had no idea of how to go about getting himself into school there. Of course, he could have simply gone, roughed it, lived the Bohemian life in the Village, and at one point he was going to do just that. But his mother, Grace, wouldn’t hear of it. She forbade him to go; she had an image that he was “frail” and was certain he would never survive such a life. There’s no use in trying to make her out a villain for this decision. Indeed, with my grandfather either gone to sea or wasting the family’s money in sailors’ bars and whorehouses, Grace had slaved to keep the family afloat. In all ways she was a remarkable woman. Though her education had ended in the eighth grade, she played Mozart on the piano and her favorite book was The Magic Mountain.

  It was beyond my father’s will (or anyone else’s in the family) to defy her, so he stayed home in Baltimore, accepting a scholarship to the Maryland Institute of Art. Here he was happy enough and spent two years painting his watercolors, taking field trips throughout the lushly vegetated city and down to the Eastern Shore to make nature studies. It was by all accounts one of the happiest times in his life.

  In his second year at the Institute, he met my mother, Ruth, at a church dance. She was a beautiful red-haired girl, full-figured, with an appealing overbite, and a pageboy haircut. In old photographs she looked like Gene Tierney. On her side, my mother was from a farm family who had recently migrated to Baltimore when the crops failed in Mayo County. Bored by her provincial home life, she was thrilled to meet a sensitive boy, a real artist.

  Now when I remember the terrible screaming, the endless fighting, I try to think what it must have been like in those first years of courtship, the two of them taking the old yellow No. 8 streetcar out the York Road to “the country” (only one mile past Calvert College there was once nothing but forest and streams and glowing, green Maryland fields), my father with his easel and canvas, my mother, his lovely muse, holding his paintbrushes and colors. I see them walking over the old train trestle that bisects Towson, walking and talking philosophy. (My father, like my grandmother, was much taken with Bertrand Russell.) I think of the excitement they must have felt, their growing love for one another, my father’s wonder that at last he had met a girl who understood him as his mother did. I picture them lying in one of those impossibly beautiful green fields, near a stand of oaks, my mother with a picnic basket, my father thin and muscular and tan. I watch them making love, feeling young and beautiful and strong. They must have felt that they were never going to get old, would never turn bitter, never turn away from the good, radiant world.

  But their happiness lasted a short season. The Depression wiped out my father’s hopes of becoming an artist and in short order he was put to work in a local CCC camp, building roads and planting trees in the reservoir by Druid Hill Park. My mother, meantime, worked as a secretary for the Relief Fund, the first of the terrible slavelike jobs she held all her life.

  After Roosevelt got the country back on its feet again, my father tried to resume his painting career, but there was little outlet for his work in Baltimore. It was not only that people were too poor to purchase paintings. There is something else in the very fabric of Baltimoreans, and it is this thing that drove my father mad, I believe. The city has such a deep provinciality, such a profound inferiority complex, that it rarely recognizes its own.

  To be blunt, my father’s dreams were crushed, and he became a bitter and sarcastic man.

  I remember him standing on the front porch looking at the neighbors coming home from their jobs. He would say to me, “Look at ‘em, Tommy, a bunch of sheep. All living in their goddamned little row houses, all having their same little row thoughts. Who do the goddamned Orioles play tonight, wonder if there’s any National Bohemian in the ‘fridge, gotta get up to the moronic Catholic church and play their precious bingo. Never read a book. God knows, they would never look at a painting. Mencken had it right, son. Baltimorons, that’s what old H. L. called them and that’s what they are, a great, brutal horde, as dumb as any jungle animal. Believe me kid, get the hell out of here as soon as you can. ‘Cause once you get married … you’re in this craphole for life.”

  “But why don’t we all leave, Dad?” I said, staring at his pinched face, silhouetted by the perfect evening blue light. “We could go. We could live in New York.”

  “Ha!” he would laugh, shaking his head as he leaned on the porch railing. “You don’t know your mother, son. She can’t leave wonderful Baltimore. Why, to her, New York is next to nothing and Paris is some city dump. Oh, no, son, to your mother, there is only one real place in the entire world, godforsaken old Baltimore.”

  The bitterness in his voice, the sound of defeat, frightened me even then and though I badly wanted to back him up, I felt torn apart, for I didn’t really want to leave town either. Like my mother, I loved our redbrick row house neighborhood, loved the fact that just down the street were my friends all living in houses that looked just like mine and around the corner was Tom Mullin field where we would act out our fantasies of being major leaguers. I loved getting on my bike and heading down to Northwood Shopping Center to see the Saturday afternoon horror films, loved having my aunt and grandparents only five blocks away. On Sundays, I would call Pop and ride my bike over to Stonewood Road, where we would eat root beer ice cream floats and watch the Colts on TV, and he would tell me about the old-time players, Jim Thorpe and Red Grange and Bronco Nagurski. I miss him badly even today, dear old toothless, big-muscled Pop, who had started his life as a farmer and become a full-time carpenter at age forty-seven and could fix anything, a man who loved everyday life, the simple joy of the Colts game, or making a plate of stewed tomatoes and who himself thought Baltimore was the best place in the world. Indeed, once, when I was a tortured teenager, I said to him, “Pop, I want to go live in Washington,” and he merely looked at me and said, “Don’t know why you would want to do that, boy. Those people don’t even live where they grew up.” A sentiment my mother shared in spades.

  So, I loved Baltimore, too, and yet I knew that it had crushed something special in my father, for it was a city that only valued the practical, the everyday, a city that was ruthlessly unforgiving of its dreamers and its artists. As my mother often said to my father when he would spend too much time reading: “Mr. Philosopher. He thinks who he is, hon!”

  That was the city I grew up in—warm, nurturing, and mind-bogglingly provincial, a combination that proved deadly to my sensitive, bitter old man.

  But I am getting ahead of my story (a habit of mine, like my father, I am impatient, eager for fireworks), for in 1965, I knew all this only dimly. Indeed, I would liken my own consciousness to that of a drunken pug fighter who has suffered so many blows he only wants to fall in his corner and get the seconds to plug his cuts.

  Not that my parents fighting was a new situation. They had fought off and on for years. There would be a violent period followed by a couple of weeks (sometimes, even a month) of relative calm. Then the mad cycle of screaming and crying would begin again. Of course, given the lunacy in our house, I should have gone away to college, and I would have if I had planned things a little more carefully, but in those days the future was like some alien, uninhabitable planet and my parents were too wrapped in their own misery to worry about my higher education.

  Indeed, to be fair, I had given them little reason to think of it. My high school years had been spent drinking National Bohemian beer, playing cards with friends, and chasing girls at Ameche’s Drive-In. My three best friends were, like myself, drunken carousing boys, all bright underachievers and after graduation they had scattered, attending colleges out of state. As for me, I had convinced myself that I “hated school,” when quite the opposite was true. The truth was, I had always been a torn child, rowdy
and sensitive, bookish and athletic. This kind of complexity was no more tolerated by the children of my neighborhood than it was by the adults. One had to be a jock or a brain, and those of us who fell in between were highly suspect. Worse, we felt not quite right about ourselves. I remember stabbing myself with a fork in the hand once to prove I was a “real boy,” not some fag intellectual.

  Given all the tensions at home and my own ambivalence about my bookishness, I studied only sporadically. Needless to say, my grade-point average suffered, and when it came time to apply to colleges, I found that I had a very slim selection to choose from.

  Finally, when the deadline was almost past, I applied to Calvert, telling myself that I didn’t really want to go, that the only reason I was bothering at all was because it was near my house and I had seen a few cute girls walking across the campus. When Calvert surprised me and accepted my application, I felt no joy at all. After all, I had nearly convinced myself that I was not a scholar, not a reader, not a sensitive intellectual type. Nothing, in short, like my father, the failure.

  But there was a surprise waiting for me at Calvert. Dr. Sylvester Spaulding. Like my father he was bookish, like my father he was brilliant, a lover of the arts. But unlike my father, Dr. Spaulding seemed a happy man. Rigorous, demanding, but essentially happy. Baltimore had not crushed him, for he didn’t really live in Baltimore. He lived inside the books he read, he loved literature, and he transmitted that love to anyone in his class.

  Having written this, however, I should say that he was not a Romantic. He didn’t believe in motivational tricks to make students read. He was demanding, frighteningly so. The early days I spent in his Contemporary European Novel class were both exhilarating and humiliating. First, there was the matter of the man himself. Dr. S. was intimidating in the extreme. Small-boned, trim, and dressed inevitably in a herringbone suit and a rep tie, he walked nervously back and forth as he lectured, tapping his glasses on his open palm. He had total recall of every poem, play, or novel that he had ever read, and he expected his students to understand his every reference.

  “We are here,” he said on the first day of class, “to discuss art, high art. If that makes me an elitist, then so be it. I believe art, true art, is always elitist in that it is complex rather than simple, in that it stands above the common fray, in that it transcends the mundane and often unpleasant facts of our lives. If it were not elitist, if it were to be what some misguided souls wish, an art ‘of the people,’ then it would lower its standards, become kitsch, and ironically lose its power to move and instruct people at all.”

  He stared at me like he was trying to see into my soul. I swallowed hard and tried to meet his gaze.

  I had never been exposed to such seriousness of purpose, and although I was intimidated, I was also thrilled. I looked at Dr. Spaulding and said, through an embarrassed cough, “I … quite agree, sir.”

  He nodded as if he approved, tapped his glasses into his palm, and went on: “True art is demanding, complex, filled with multiple meanings. You don’t enter into the worlds of Henry James, James Joyce, or Virginia Woolf lightly as you might casually turn on the television or listen to the banal confessional chatter of coffeehouse poets, like Allan Ginsberg. I know my attitude toward art seems like sacrilege to some of you, who have been raised to think that the Baltimore Colts are the highest achievement of Western civilization, but I believe that the rewards of art are far greater than our good crab cake-eating citizens know.”

  I knew from the second I heard him speak that I wanted to be his most serious student. As I left class that day, I heard some of the other kids moaning about how hard the course would be, but I felt a secret jubilation. I wanted it to be difficult. I wanted it to be arcane, complex, mysterious. I wanted to lose myself in the rich sensibilities, the aristocratic manners of Henry James, of Virginia Woolf.

  I wanted to be lifted up on the wings of genius, with Dr. Sylvester Spaulding as my guide.

  That night, as I headed home, I felt lighter than air. I couldn’t wait to tell my father about Dr. S. I envisioned the three of us drinking beer, seriously discussing the subtleties of literature together. Perhaps, I thought giddily, meeting Dr. Spaulding might even inspire my father to resurrect his painting career. But, when I arrived, my father wasn’t in the mood to listen. He had retreated, as he often did of late, into his temple of bliss, into his inner sanctum, into his secret garden of tile, the Great Bathroom.

  This was his retreat, the last step in the great bitterness that had become his life. He walked down the hall in his navy shorts, shut the door, and was gone, gone into the land of steam and running water, acne creams, scalpels, cotton balls, Q-Tips, gauzy bandages, razors, special laxatives, back scratchers, and specially ordered Lufte sponges from Sweden. Gone, gone, gone from Baltimore into some narcissistic playland where a man could dream, as he endlessly worked on his thin, muscular, acne-covered body.

  He would enter the Inner Sanctum at 6 A.M., stay in there shitting; pissing; tooth scrubbing; washing and rewashing his body, his face, his hands; slicing open the big red acne cysts that plagued his back, neck, and face until 7:30, at which time he would emerge, wrapped in towels, lanced boils bleeding from his chest like some acnefied versions of Roman Catholic bleeding hearts—James Fallon, the Baltimore Bathroom Job. On some mornings, like a Roman emperor, he would raise his scalpel high above his head, stare wide-eyed into my bedroom, and scream, “They thought they had Jim Fallon, Tom. The bastard cysts thought they were taking over, but I showed them, by God! I showed them.” Then he would join thousands of other depressed and furious souls on the Baltimore Beltway in a nose-to-nose gridlocked drive across town to his hated civil servant’s job at the Social Security Administration, from which he would return at six, snarl at my mother for a while over her nervously overcooked dinners, and once again enter the Holy Toilet at around seven, from which he would not remove his oil-drained carcass until eleven at night. To this day I cannot think of my father without hearing a toilet flush.

  Sometimes he would take in his purple Philco radio and play the classical music station for hours on end—Rachmaninoff, Beethoven, Mozart—while my mother would sit as though she had been poleaxed at the white kitchen table, under the golden sunburst clock. What did he do in there? That was the great mystery. The great unanswered question, though, of course, I knew part of it. He would wash, then wash again, place selected salves on his skin, brown salves, skin-toned salves, white creams, special acne soaps, magical oils from Formosa that promised to rejuvenate dead cells. And though he barely talked to me, he never stopped his dialogue with his pimples. Through the oaken door, I could hear him saying, “Yes, you little red creep. You think you’ve got old James Fallon licked, but I’ll show you. I’ll show you, you pus-filled bastard.” Then he would hold high his mighty scalpel and lance the pimple with his sterling silver boil popper, as though he were a medieval knight on a white charger lancing Baltimore itself, the great pimple of a city that had kept him from reaching his artistic dreams.

  This was nothing new to me. He had been behaving this way since I was twelve. Much of my life had been lived leaning against a bathroom door, trying to tell my father about a shot I made in basketball, what happened on our Boy Scout trip, a spectacular catch in an Oriole game, or the plot of a movie I’d just seen. Sometimes, when he had had a particularly good lancing session and had sufficiently screamed at my poor mother for a few hours, he would even be in a decent enough mood to answer.

  So in the fall of 1965, hot with excitement from books and my heroic new teacher, Dr. S., I found myself once again leaning up against the Holy Bathroom door, saying, “Hey, Dad, I have this brilliant new professor over at Calvert. We’re studying Kafka.” After turning off the water, he answered, “Kafka, huh? Well, that’s good, Tom, yeah that’s great. Read The Trial when I was sixteen and I can assure you that Kafka knew exactly what he was talking about. This whole city is one Kafkaesque nightmare, believe me. Big shots run your life, guys you n
ever even see.”

  “I finished it today, Dad. You know, it’s amazing. Dr. Spaulding told us that no one understood that Kafka was a genius except his pal, Brod.”

  “Nothing all that amazing about it, Tom,” my father said, his voice rising so I could hear him through the roar of the shower. “The Baltimorons didn’t understand Poe either. Left him in the gutter to die, but now, of course, they have the goddamned Edgar Allan Poe house fully restored. Oh, yeah, they love him now that he’s good and dead, and the founding father assholes can sell tickets to see where he starved and froze. That’s your Baltimoron, for you, Tom! Love their artists when they’re dead. Can’t wait for them to die!!!”

  Though it was a sour, bitter answer, hardly the elevated conversation I had hoped for, I wasn’t really discouraged. No, I was thrilled at the sound of my father’s voice croaking over the roaring shower, ecstatic that I had gotten him to respond at all. “This Dr. Spaulding is a great guy, Dad. He really understands literature.” I hoped that he would respond again. I had so much to tell him about Dr. S.

  But suddenly my mother was leaning on the door next to me saying, “James Fallon, don’t talk that way about your native city to your son. He doesn’t need your bitterness.” But I quickly cut her off: “No, Mom, it’s all right, I don’t mind,” and felt an icy fear come over me. God, they were going to start at it again, just when I had gotten him to talk to me. Oh, Lord, don’t let them do it. My fingers got cold, and I felt the panic starting to rise inside my chest. But there was no stopping her; she was flying now, soaring, “Well, I do mind. Okay, Bertrand Russell? You can’t blame everything on Baltimore, James Fallon.”