“He’s fine,” I called quickly. I wanted Neel and June to keep discussing me. I wanted their subject to remain my hunger.
Kneeling close to Freddy, I brought my face into the tangled nest of hair that smelled of his own briny sweat and spoke straight into his ear: “Shut. Up.” But the aperture of his mouth only widened, and he yowled so luxuriantly that both parents flocked over to see what was the matter.
Then I hated him. Maybe a minute earlier he had nearly died, but now he was once more the volatile creature who consumed so much of Neel’s and June’s attention. I stared at him as they flanked him. Those plump little legs I wanted to gouge with my fingernails. That floppy hair, against whose blue-black softness I loved to brush my chin while we read books together, I wanted to yank with all my might.
June picked him up and walked with him into the meadow, rubbing his back.
Neel remained, squatting lightly beside me. Only later would I realize how spry he’d been for sixty-six; then I took it for granted. He cocked his head at me, waiting. He was patient that way, generous; he always wanted to hear your version.
“He put a rock in his mouth.” I shrugged. “I made him take it out.”
Why should I tell Neel he’d nearly strangled?
The blessings of liberty are worth many wounds.
• • •
SURPRISINGLY, the second major disagreement I witnessed between Neel and June also had to do with me and not Freddy. I say surprisingly because compared with Freddy, I was the easy one, the child who caused our parents hardly any trouble. At least that’s how the story went for a long time.
The second disagreement arose over Neel’s staunch resistance to my wish to follow Kitty to public school, and June’s quietly firm opinion that I should be allowed to try it—but it would not occur for over a year.
The first year of the Manseaus’ living at Batter Hollow was in many ways the happiest of my life. I finally had a friend, the friend for whom I’d been pining: a girl my age who lived next door, who at once fulfilled proverbial expectation and satisfied flesh-and-blood reality. The central fact of this year was that Kitty’s parents, like mine, chose not to send her to school. Don Manseau was a former pupil of Neel’s, and after he and his wife had made the radical decision to leave New York City and take up residence in the Art Barn, it was not such a great leap for them to allow their youngest child a year of “experiential learning,” alongside Fred and me, as well as the Gann kids. (Noah Salinas-Buchbinder, the other school-age child at Batter Hollow, attended Freyburg Primary; as a result we saw less of him and tended to be more shy of one another.) Don, who turned out to be the tallest of the three circusy men Freddy and I had seen moving furniture that first day, and Meg, the woman in the flowered dress with the milk-caramel voice, had both left jobs at a graphic design agency to move eighty miles north and devote themselves to earlier, less practical loves: metal sculpting and stained glass, respectively.
They had two older children, neither of whom lived at home: a twenty-two-year-old daughter in the Peace Corps in Malawi, and a fifteen-year-old son at Clembrook Academy in Connecticut.
“It’s a prep school,” Kitty informed me, making a face.
“What’s a prep school?”
“Strict.”
“Why’s he go there?”
“It’s the right place for him.” She said it in a rehearsed way that suggested she was parroting what she’d heard Don and Meg say. For what sort of child was a strict school the right place? I thought her brother must be wild and difficult, impossible to control, worse than Fred. Then I wondered whether prep school might be the right place for Fred, too, and if I should tell Neel and June about it.
But when Kitty showed me a framed photograph of her brother, looking grimly aloof in his navy school blazer and tie—this of course was Dennis—I decided he couldn’t be Fredlike at all. It turned out he was the medium-sized of the three circusy men we had seen the day the Manseaus moved in, but I had a hard time putting together the image of this serious boy with that of the loose-limbed, golden-skinned fellow who’d twirled the lamp base like a white baton up into the twilit sky.
Later I would learn that all the men in Meg’s family had for generations attended Clembrook Academy, and that while she had not planned to send her own son there, Dennis wound up suffering a painful transition to middle school—where, as a soft-spoken boy of slender build with a fondness for gymnastics and Tintin, he became the target of such vicious bullying (all verbal, predominantly female) that he lost ten pounds and had trouble sleeping—upon which Meg and Don decided Clembrook Academy was worth a try after all. When eventually I received pieces of this story, first from Kitty and then Meg and finally from Dennis himself, I felt protective of the boy in the navy blazer and grateful for the existence of a place like Clembrook. Back then, however, I was happy to follow Kitty’s lead and call it Clenchbutt Academy, and to write off her brother as a stuffy prig.
If we had gone to regular school that year, we’d have been in the second grade, Kitty and I. This I had on the authority of Kitty herself, who’d attended kindergarten and first grade in public school in Manhattan, and was thus something of an expert on the subject. Second grade, she informed me with insiderly aplomb, was when you learned cursive and fractions and got to hatch butterflies.
“Neel!” I stormed into our house. June had gone out somewhere with Freddy, but I knew Neel would be in his study, a low-ceilinged room off the kitchen, whose mint-green walls sported not only the portrait of Rousseau but also many framed photographs of Batter Hollow back in the old days. Most of Neel’s writings were about the school in its heyday, how it had changed the lives of hundreds of children, how he personally had encouraged the development of modes of inquiry by stepping out of his pupils’ way. He never used their real names. Instead, following the lead of his hero Rousseau, who’d written a whole book about his hypothetical pupil Émile, Neel wrote of Jill and of John, and despite the fact that they didn’t exist, I came to resent and even despise these two. “Why don’t you call them Ava and Fred?” I asked him once.
He laid a hand on my head and looked kindly down at me. “Because you are you and only you.”
Now I think this answer is not half bad, but at the time I considered it a dodge.
Most of his small study was occupied by an enormous camphorwood desk on which sat an almost equally massive IBM Selectric. I could hear its heavy, arrhythmic clunking now as I flung open the door.
Neel looked up with a scowl of which I took no notice (his standard greeting when interrupted in his study, it was mostly an act, a self-parodying performance of a curmudgeon). When he saw me genuinely bristling with indignation, his mouth curved into a grin. Neel loved uninhibited expression in children, regardless of what was being expressed. In fact he always seemed most delighted by uninhibited negative expression.
I stuck my hands on my hips: “I want to learn cursive and fractions and I want to hatch a butterfly.”
Untroubled, Neel stroked an earlobe: another of his stock gestures. He looked around at the walls of his study, feigning interest in the many black-and-white images. I myself never tired of examining these photos of students and staff doing all sorts of interesting-looking things: trying on masks, putting up a tire swing, making gigantic soap bubbles, painting the Art Barn mural, toasting sausages over a bonfire, building something with straws, running, hugging, sleeping, wrestling. One picture showed Margo, Neel’s second wife, kneeling in the community garden, a heap of just-dug radishes on her lap. A short, stoutish woman with white hair and thick glasses, Margo had died before I was born—but not before June joined the school’s faculty as its youngest member.
Sometimes I tried to imagine June as she would have been on her first ever visit to Batter Hollow. She went as part of an avant-garde puppet troupe invited to perform for the students. I imagine her willowy and confident, striding around campus with f
rank curiosity, her hands thrust deep in the pockets of her long peasant skirt. She had no training as a teacher, having spent her early twenties touring Europe with the puppeteers, but Neel liked inexperience in his staff and preferred hiring them as novices, unmolded by what he referred to as a mania for instruction. After the performance, June was persuaded to stay on for a few weeks to organize the painting of the Art Barn mural. By the time the mural was done, she’d been offered a place on the faculty.
Neel and June always maintained they had not become a couple until after Neel’s marriage to Margo ended, but even before I was old enough to note the careful semantic contortion (they did not say “until after Margo died”), I held the belief that Neel must have been smitten from the start. That June had been drawn to Neel—a man twenty years her senior—strained my credulity not in the least. After all, Neel was Neel, bathed in the glow of his admirers’ gaze. To me, their offspring, the notion that romance had kindled between them from the moment they had first laid eyes, et cetera, et cetera, could not seem anything but right and true.
I’d never seen a photo of Neel’s first wife, Roberta (Robbie Robbins, this had briefly, cinematically made her). June explained that Robbie and Neel had been “ridiculously young” when they married, both just twenty, and that within a year she’d “run away” with a trombonist. I pictured Robbie as an indistinct blur, her hair streaming out horizontally behind her as she ran. Despite or because of how little was ever said about Robbie Robbins, a kind of glamour accrued to her. She seemed a more threatening rival to June than Margo had ever been, and the thought of her made me want to throw my arms around Neel, less to comfort him for having been abandoned, perhaps, than to remind him bodily of where his heart’s home lay.
Now, though, standing in the study, I had no desire to comfort or cling to him; he was being, in his deceptively benign way, infuriating. “What’s cursive?” he queried, scraping the back of his fingers against his neck.
“Don’t play dumb, Neel. It’s that fancy writing grown-ups do.”
“Hm.” He put on a contemplative face, then rummaged around his desk. “You mean like this?” He handed me a scrap of paper, the beginnings of a grocery list, written in what June liked to call his “abominable chicken scratch.” I could barely make out: COFFEE AVOCADO FETA BUNS APRICOTS.
“Not that, but you know what I mean. And I want to learn fractions and hatch a butterfly,” I reminded him.
Here he smiled with such delight I knew before he spoke that I must have made a blunder. “Ava, my daughter,” he said, “there I cannot help you. A butterfly must hatch itself.”
In the end, Neel did teach me fractions over the next several weeks, mostly using ordinary objects that fell naturally into the course of our daily activities: cutting up an apple or dividing a handful of raisins, folding the laundry, pointing out the Dasher’s fuel gauge. One night after June washed her hair, she allowed herself to be used as a fractions lesson for Kitty and me both. She sat obligingly on the flowered couch with a towel around her shoulders, and Kitty and I, each armed with a comb, climbed up on the radiator behind her, whereupon Neel talked us through a succession of steps: parting her wet hair down the middle, separating each side into first two, then three, then four equal hanks. Then back into thirds again. “Now,” directed Neel, “each of you take the one-sixth from near her face and place it between the other two-sixths on your side.” In this way he taught us not only fractions but how to make braids.
Neel correctly interpreted the rest of my educational demands as being less tied to the particulars than to a general desire not to be excluded from the experience of “real school.” For that desire he held little regard, but he suggested I appeal to Kitty, who, when approached, was only too happy to re-create the school setting as she remembered it. Up in her bedroom, which had been crafted out of a corner of the barn’s former hayloft, she laid out the family’s supply of washcloths. These were “mats,” she said, for the “students”—some dozen stuffed animals, Freddy and me. We took our seats and then she stood before us with a yardstick and led us in “lessons,” singing and spelling, mostly, before sending us to the little sink she did indeed have in the corner of her bedroom, where she watched over us sternly as we washed our hands, then had us sit back on our “mats” where she handed out “snack”—marshmallows snuck from the pantry and spoonfuls of grape jelly she insisted on feeding us out of a jar. “We’re not playing babies,” I objected. “We’re playing school. Anyway I’m not using the same spoon as him.”
Freddy, meanwhile, having appropriated the spoon and scraped out all the remaining jelly, decided he was finished with school and wandered out. We watched him go: half the class, if you didn’t count the stuffed animals.
“All right, students!” Kitty clapped her hands smartly. “Naptime!”
“How about I be teacher now?”
“You don’t know how.”
“Neither do you—second-graders don’t nap.”
“Do too. I’ve been to school.”
“My father ran a school.”
“Not a real school.”
“Was too.”
“Was not.”
I shoved her then, partly in defense of Neel but more because it dawned on me that she had knowledge of both worlds—the world of regular neighborhoods and schools, and the world we inhabited here in these five cottages tucked into a woods. I was then just coming to understand how much these worlds differed, how limited and odd my own known world apparently was. The shove was harder than I’d intended and the back of her head knocked against the wall with a crack. We looked at each other in surprise. Kitty raised a hand slowly to her little cap of fair hair, and her mouth began to wobble and her eyes to fill. I fled the house aghast, pounding down the stairs, tearing through the front door and flying over the front steps without touching a single tread. I did not see her again for the rest of the day.
Our first fight.
“What did you think of school?” Neel asked later that evening.
“Ah-like, ah-like jelly,” said Freddy, speaking around his thumb. I could understand him easily, but Neel only smiled in a vague sort of way. This was around the time that I was beginning to realize how often other people, even Neel and June, had difficulty parsing Freddy’s speech.
“You liked it, eh?” Neel guessed, and turned to me. “And you?”
“It was all right,” I said airily, wanting neither to give Neel satisfaction nor to confess how the game had ended.
• • •
THAT FALL MIDGETROPOLIS BEGAN. I don’t remember who thought up the name; it felt as if we’d discovered the place rather than invented it. That was its glory: how real it was. What greater artistry, what finer power did we yearn for at that age than the ability to make our make-believe real? Coax fantasy to life. Once named, that part of the woods was forever transformed, and I could no longer regard that patch of ground without spying the order, the architecture, hidden within the growth.
Midgetropolis: a glade off one of the paths that crisscrossed the woods maybe half a mile behind the five cottages. It lay in a shallow dip marked off by a dense swath of ferns on one side, a stand of silver birches along the back, and at the low end, a rocky swale that became a running creek after every rain. In places the ground was laid with a bright emerald patchwork of moss; elsewhere it was roots and rotting leaves. To anyone just happening by, it offered nothing visually noteworthy. To us it was a dominion unto itself, bearing no relationship to the world of the cottages, or to Freyburg or New York or for that matter America. It existed apart, immune from the rules and customs of those realms.
It was Freddy, really, who started it all. He’s the one who found not only the kettle but the slab. It was October, not bitter yet, but brisk, the air laced with the fragrance of wood smoke. We’d gone looking for salamanders, Kitty and Freddy and me, without success, pushing farther and farther into the woods, see
king out the dampest places, and when Kitty went capering off the path into a lush, low-lying area, Freddy and I followed.
We squatted among mossy rocks and rotting logs, turning them over, checking the undersides of leaves, searching for a flicker of orange but finding only brown beetles and spiders, until after a while Kitty said offhandedly, “Salamanders can start fires, you know.”
I eyed her consideringly. Already I’d noticed her penchant for volunteering sketchy-sounding facts on an exuberant array of subjects. The vexing thing was that I could not say with certainty she was making things up; she had, after all, lived in the city and attended real school, and her fonts of knowledge included not only two older siblings but also a wealth, it seemed, of worldly uncles and aunts and cousins, themselves apparently expert in a great variety of fields.
“With their tongues,” she clarified.
“That’s not possible.”
“Yes it is. My sister’s a biologist.”
I did not know what a biologist did, but I’d heard my parents speak admiringly of the Manseaus’ older daughter in Malawi, and decided against mounting a challenge on this front. Freddy had moved away from us, wading through ferns that grew high as his waist. I could see him running both hands through their feathery fringe. His head, tilted skyward, oscillated slowly back and forth, and he was half humming, half crooning tunelessly, his lips open to the trees above.
“Freddy and I have caught loads of salamanders,” I informed her, “and no fire’s ever come out of them.” All they would do is promenade over our fingers with their astonishing, delicate toes.
“But have they ever stuck out their tongues?”
I could not recall.
“That’s why, then.”
How certain she was, how assured. She blinked her chicory eyes.
“S’ah!” cried Freddy. “Hey-ah!” Or maybe it was, “Ava!”
No Book but the World: A Novel Page 9