Morningside Heights

by Joshua Henkin

  “And do you want to know the happy thing? Oliver asked me to come with him.” Oliver was an attorney, his mother said, and he had a son, Victor, who was Arlo’s age, and a daughter, Penelope, who was two years younger.

  “You’ve just met him,” Arlo said, “and you’re already moving to London with him? You’re moving all the way across the world with someone I don’t know?”

  “You’ll get to know him,” his mother said. “And London isn’t all the way across the world. I could be in London right now, and you wouldn’t even realize it.”

  Maybe his mother was in London right now and this was the next news she would lower on him. “You really work fast.”

  “Oh, Arlo, that’s a terrible thing to say. I had a feeling you wouldn’t take this well.”

  “How would you like me to take it?”

  “You could be happy for me. I always try to be happy for you.” She was quiet for a moment. “You set things in motion, Arlo. You couldn’t have expected me to wait around.”

  So his mother was moving to London because he’d chosen his father.

  * * *

  —

  Those first few weeks, Arlo’s father would come into Arlo’s bedroom at night and watch him sleep.

  One night Arlo said, “Why do you sit there in the dark?”

  “Because I’m amazed you’re here. I used to watch you sleep when you were a baby.”

  The next day his father said, “It’s so bare in your room. Why don’t you decorate the walls?”

  Maybe it was because he believed he was a squatter, and so it was best not to leave a mark.

  His father took him to a print shop, and a week later the prints arrived, one of Ernie Banks—Arlo thought of his mother watching the Cubs—the other of the Sex Pistols.

  “Ernie Banks I know, but who are the Sex Pistols?”

  Arlo was surprised his father even knew Ernie Banks; no one knew less about popular culture than his father. “The Sex Pistols are a punk rock band.”

  “I see,” his father said, though he didn’t seem to.

  The next night, Sarah heard a commotion in Arlo’s room. Their father was by the dresser, lining up bowls of ice cream. “We’re having a party,” he said. “Arlo and I are making up for lost time.”

  The night after that, Sarah heard noises: the percussing of objects, the pounding of walls. “What’s going on in there?”

  “Dad and I are having a pillow fight.”

  “Oh, I bet.”

  But the next day, when she asked him about this, her father said, “Of course we were having a pillow fight. I’ve never had so much fun in my life.”

  * * *

  —

  One morning, Arlo’s father produced a pair of handball gloves and set them down on Arlo’s plate. “I used to play handball when I was a kid. I could probably still teach you a thing or two.”

  They walked up to Columbia, where Arlo’s father did an hour’s work, then changed into a T-shirt and medical scrubs.

  “You look like you’re ready to do surgery.”

  “Surgery on you,” his father said, and he rapped the handball against Arlo’s chin.

  They went down to the Interchurch Center, with its wide exterior flat as sheet metal. Staring at the traffic on Riverside Drive, Arlo said, “If I miss the ball, it’ll go into the street.”

  “Incentive, in that case, not to miss the ball.”

  The learning curve for handball wasn’t steep: when the ball came at you, you just whacked it. One time, when Arlo lost the point and it was his turn to give chase, a bus knocked the ball toward Grant’s Tomb, and when he returned, his father was out of breath, bent over his sneakers. “I’m just lulling you into complacency,” his father said.

  His father must have been right, because he was up 8–3, then 10–4, and then the game was over.

  But in the second game, Arlo was the one making his father run back and forth, sending him into the park to retrieve his winners.

  “Rubber game?” his father said, but he was spent, and Arlo won the third game easily.

  * * *

  —

  When they got home, Sarah said, “Why don’t you ever play handball with me?”

  “I’d be happy to,” her father said.

  “Then why don’t you?”

  That night Pru said, “I’m glad you have your son back. Just don’t forget about your daughter.”

  “Forget about her? She’s the apple of my eye.” But now that Arlo had moved in, he was all Spence could think about.

  * * *

  —

  Arlo was enrolled at his sister’s progressive private school, but everyone agreed he would need time to adjust, so on the first day Pru said, “Go easy on yourself, Arlo. You should cut yourself some slack.”

  But Arlo would need a lot more than slack. He would need reading skills, the rudiments of world and American history, the basics of biology and geography, the fundamentals of writing. The rest of the students were studying a second language and he was still stuck on his first. Even math was proving difficult because the math he’d excelled at was arithmetic, and his classmates were studying trigonometry; some had already moved on to precalculus.

  When his father was a child, he’d been skipped two grades ahead. Now, as if in payback, Arlo started the day in tenth grade and by lunchtime he’d been demoted to ninth. By the end of the day he was in a classroom a floor below, seated among the eighth graders.

  “Where will they send him next?” Sarah asked her mother. “Preschool?”

  Arlo knew where they would send him next: to seventh grade, his sister’s class.

  One day Sarah’s friend said, “How did he even get into this school?”

  “Because I go here,” Sarah said ruefully.

  “Sibling’s prerogative,” someone else said. “Once the first sibling gets in, the rest of the octuplets get to go, too. It’s good for fund-raising.”

  “His problem is reading,” Sarah said.

  “You should buy him Reading for Dummies.”

  “The problem is, he’d have to read it.”

  Three weeks after he started at his sister’s school, Arlo’s father and stepmother removed him from it. They took him to a private reading specialist in a room covered with posters of books, and the results were abundantly clear. “He’s dyslexic,” the specialist said. “I’m surprised no one discovered it sooner.”

  Arlo was sent to a new school, for students with learning disabilities, and sometimes he would see Sarah on the bus ride home, and they would nod at each other like vague familiars. “Go talk to your brother,” her friend said.

  “I have the rest of the night to talk to him. I have the rest of my life, unfortunately.”

  “So you flunked out of school,” she said to him that night.

  “I didn’t flunk out.” But that was only technically true. He’d been told he would do better somewhere else, so his father and stepmother removed him from school. It was like a politician offering to resign: once you excavated a little deeper, not many resignations were voluntary.

  * * *

  —

  Every day, Arlo’s father would come home with vocabulary words, and Arlo was forced to look them up. “It’s different for you,” he said. “You don’t have dyslexia.”

  “That shouldn’t stop you from looking things up.” It was 1992, and Columbia had an Office of Disability Services, which everyone called ODS, but Arlo’s father liked to blend the letters into a single word: odious. In another decade, Arlo’s father would see a true mushrooming of students with learning disabilities, kids who arrived at college with a diagnosis and a doctor’s note, who required extra time to take their tests and a quiet room of their own in which to be examined. Arlo’s father wasn’t a particularly good roller skater, but he wasn’t allowed to
skate on a special rink. Yet all his students felt entitled to their own rink. Now some hapless teaching assistant was always coming to him with a student who couldn’t hand in his paper. My medicine ate my homework, Arlo’s father called these excuses.

  With Arlo’s diagnosis of dyslexia, his father might have become more sympathetic to learning disabilities, and in certain respects he did. But another part of him remained dubious. What if Arlo simply wasn’t smart? How was that possible? He was Spence Robin, number one in his class at Stuyvesant High School and then again at Cornell, on to Princeton for graduate school, where he finished his doctorate in four years. The youngest English professor ever to receive tenure at Columbia. Intelligence was the answer, and when intelligence left you short, you relied on pluck. With the right teacher anything could be taught and with the right student anything could be learned, and he was the right teacher and his children were the right students. All Arlo had to do was ask Sarah, who would have told him that when she’d gone to the pediatrician for her six-month checkup, her father had asked the doctor if he, Sarah’s father, could teach her to sit up. “I’d like to speed up the process,” he’d said.

  To speed up the process. That had been Arlo’s father’s attitude toward Sarah, and it would be his attitude toward Arlo too. The difference was, Sarah had an aptitude for school and she’d lived her whole life under her father’s roof. With Arlo, there were years of bad influence to overcome.

  So Arlo’s father set to making repairs. Arlo, at his new school, was back in tenth grade; in a year and a half, his father said, he would be taking the SAT. If his father had mentioned this to Arlo’s teachers, they would have said, Well, hold your horses there, Professor Robin. We’ll have to see what comes to pass. But Arlo’s father didn’t like to hold his horses, and he didn’t believe in waiting for what came to pass. He would make things come to pass. So he returned from work with vocabulary words for Arlo. Some were long and hard to pronounce and others were short and easy to pronounce, but Arlo believed they had one thing in common: they had never appeared on the SAT and they would never appear on the SAT, and what in the world kind of books was his father reading that he came across these words? Quondam, for instance, which meant erstwhile, which meant former, and which Arlo would never encounter, on the SAT or off it.

  In his father’s dining room, so many books lined the shelves it could have been mistaken for a library with some food in the middle. Many of his father’s words Sarah didn’t know either. She didn’t know recondite or hortatory or perspicacious or louche. But when their father picked up a flashcard and said “Adhere,” she said, “Adhere is easy.”

  Arlo tried to define adhere, but all he could say was, “You know, adhere.”

  His father said, “You don’t know a word if you can’t define it.” In the bathroom, he removed a package of Band-Aids; the word adhesive was printed across the front. “They’re bandages,” he said. “They stick to you.”

  And the meaning of adhere stuck to Arlo. It stuck to him the next day when he went to school, and in the cafeteria at lunch.

  But that night, when Sarah found him alone, she said, “You didn’t know adhere, you moron.”

  “It means stick to, you little cunt!”

  * * *

  —

  “You’ve been tough on Arlo,” Pru said one night. “How about going easier on the vocabulary lessons?”

  Spence wanted to go easier; he just didn’t know how. All his life, he’d made a virtue of self-reliance. When he was a boy, his father worked long hours at the shoe factory, his mother at the grocery checkout; the rest of the time they were leafleting for the Party, going to meetings, helping the workers rise up. “You take care of yourself,” his mother told him one day. She was going out for just an hour, but those might as well have been the last words she ever said to him, the proclamation she left him with for the rest of his life.

  He woke up one day with a subnormal temperature, and he put the thermometer on the radiator so his temperature would rise. It did rise: the thermometer exploded. His parents were furious, but he would have done anything not to miss school. After Enid’s accident it was even worse, and the dark halls of Stuyvesant were his only refuge.

  Now, when he looked at Arlo, he was reminded of Enid: the same bullheadedness, the same impetuousness, the same waywardness, the same rage. Arlo sneaked out one night and slept in Central Park.

  “Do you know how dangerous that was?”

  “I’m not afraid of anything.”

  But this only made Spence more afraid, just as he was afraid when Arlo struggled at school, the very thing he’d been good at.

  * * *

  —

  There were advantages, Arlo thought, to being at his new school. He was back in tenth grade, back among fifteen-year-olds. And he was at the top of his class. But there were disadvantages too. He’d been diagnosed—branded was how he thought of it—and when he saw the quincy school for the special child above the entrance, he knew special was a euphemism, just as jolly meant fat and sweet meant unattractive and articulate meant surprisingly so.

  In class, he read sounds in isolation, then combined sounds into syllables and syllables into words. The lessons were as organized as meals at a mess hall. Vowels and consonants, diphthongs and digraphs: only once he’d learned those did he advance to roots, prefixes, and suffixes. His teacher would show him the letter A, and he would name the letter, say its sound, and write it in the air. She would write handkerchief, then pass him a handkerchief, and he would say handkerchief and spell it and hold it and even smell it, and the word would get lodged in him. He had an excellent memory, and when he set his mind to something, no one worked harder than he did. He thought of his mother’s words, You have a native intelligence. In the nethermost regions of his mind, he allowed himself to believe he was smart.

  But when his father came home with his vocabulary words, Arlo thought he was just fooling himself. Even now, as an adult, Arlo dreamed about his father quizzing him on vocabulary, would wake up in his townhouse in Georgetown to his father saying, “Contentious, dilate, phrenology, concupiscent, peremptory, scintillate, temerity, wherewithal,” the sound of these words, whose meanings he now knew—he’d made sure of it—scrolling across his mind, the sound of them and the sight of them following one after the other like sheep jumping over a fence while he tried to count them.

  * * *

  —

  Sometimes after school, Arlo would stop by his father’s office. Those were the happiest times, when he had his father to himself. “Butchy!” his father said, and Arlo would sit there, doing his homework.

  “I have an idea,” his father said one day. He was teaching an evening class that semester; Arlo could do his homework in the back of the auditorium while his father lectured up front.

  One night his father said, “Hold on, class. I have an announcement to make. Arlo, would you please stand up?”

  Arlo was so startled he dropped his homework on the floor.

  “Everybody, this is my son, Arlo Zackheim. He’ll be sitting in on class this term.”

  One of the students started to clap, and another student followed. Soon the applause spread across the room.

  “Oh, God,” Arlo said as they left the auditorium. “That was so embarrassing.” But he wasn’t embarrassed, not really, and when his father said, “I wanted my students to know who you are,” he swelled.

  But on the subway home, he felt as if the air had been squeezed out of him.

  That night he said, “Why do you call me Butchy?”

  “It’s what my father called me when I was growing up.”

  “Why?”

  “I have no idea. I lived with him for years, but I never got to know him.”

  “What was his name?”

  “In Yiddish it was Shmulik, but people called him Sam. I wanted to name you after him, but your mothe
r insisted on Arlo.”

  The next day, Arlo called his mother in London and told her he was changing his name to Sam. He expected her to be hurt, but she said, “That’s fine with me, darling. A person gets to choose how he wants to be called.”

  “I want to change my name legally.”

  “Then have Dad take you to City Hall.”

  He felt defeated by her willingness. Changing his name wouldn’t change anything, just as living with his father wouldn’t change anything. His father had said they were making up for lost time, but that wasn’t possible.

  * * *

  —

  One night, when Pru asked him to clear the table, Arlo said, “Well, that’s a pain in the ass.”

  “Neck would be fine,” his father said.

  Ass, neck: what difference did it make? He would speak the way he wanted to. At sixteen, he would fart in front of his father, which his father didn’t call farting but passing gas, and he would walk around the apartment naked, as if he were still on the commune. He liked to curse, and to use words that, while not technically curses, were, in his father’s parlance, off-color. Words like jizm, blunt, spliff, spunk, leak, dump, and hurl. Épater le bourgeois, Arlo might have said, but he didn’t know French; he was having enough trouble with English. As an adult, he still didn’t know French, but his knowledge ranged wide and deep—he’d spent his whole life compensating—and he certainly knew bourgeois, which, like it or not, his father was. You could call yourself a Communist, but you weren’t a Communist when you had tenure at Columbia and you owned an apartment on the Upper West Side.

  Jizm, blunt, spliff, spunk, leak, dump, and hurl. To Arlo’s surprise, his father didn’t make rules about language, didn’t say, Arlo, please stop farting, didn’t say, You can’t walk around naked in the house. His father was made so uncomfortable by his language and his nakedness that he was rendered mute. The most he could say was Neck would be fine, forced to turn away in embarrassment.