Out of respect and burning curiosity, we attended the coroner’s hearing. The coroner was empowered in those days almost as a magistrate with a tribunal room in the basement of the federal building downtown. Tommy’s mom sat dry-eyed in the front row. She did not deign to look at us. The only one of Tommy’s classmates whom the coroner wished to hear from was Otis Cross. His name was called to a detonation of silence three times over. Father Manning stood up in the back of the tribunal room. We all swiveled at the sound of his footsteps coming up the parquet. He went with the coroner back into his private chambers and emerged, within minutes, shuddering, his neck snapping sideways— Cassius Clay four-flushing a southpaw. The verdict was that there was no verdict. What was tragic though accidental was open to neither reason nor judgment. The coroner had just had a word with a man of the cloth and both had agreed that this case had originated and should remain at the doorstep of the Almighty. Then he said that he hoped the young people in the gallery would take a lesson from what had happened.
Manning’s hands were shaking so badly that we not only had to light his cigarette for him; we had to help him smoke it as well, holding the butt to his lips at measured intervals. Tommy’s death had fashioned such a confraternity between us and the father that we crowded in and shared puffs as though it were the Deadhead water bong (in point of fact that would come later; years later). We never saw Otis again. He had been transferred out to parts unknown. We tried halfheartedly to keep him resuscitated in conversation, but, in a couple of months, he was all but dead to us as well. They bused us up to the Cloisters at least five times a year, thinking that the purgatorial atmosphere would inspire us to keep the Commandments and to pray for the dead. We noticed that in the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth centuries, Jesus died wearing a goofy smile, just like Tommy’s. Tammy Schaffer got pregnant in her senior year. She married a nerdy guy with a scraggly beard who claimed squatter’s rights over the child and the disaster, neither of which was his doing. Her mother told the ladies who called to commiserate that that “murdering nigger” was to blame.
The next semester, I had the dreaded Miss Mayhew, one of the very few lay teachers at Trinity, for senior composition. She had a shock of chrome in her hair and a pugnacious disposition. We took to calling her the “Iron Old Maid.” She assigned us a protracted essay concerning a personal growth experience. I was going through a stage of identity assertion and hormonal instability. A group of upstate naturalists, vets with flowing beards who liked to ride their Harleys naked in the cow pastures of outlying towns, would come down on weekends to sell organic canned goods in Central Park. The longhairs would set up shop underneath their beach umbrellas, and they parked their bikes in a megalithic circle all around. One Sunday a guy who had changed his name to Gunther to honor a foe whose life he had taken, and whose dog tags he had wrenched from his dead neck, sold me a Mason jar full of a viscous sugar sap with a hand-stenciled label that said simply HAPPINESS. I turned it in to Miss Mayhew in fulfillment of my personal growth assignment. She refused to grade it. She returned it with a note that said, “Cook me another, not so snotty next time.” I wrote an essay about what had happened to Tommy. She handed me back an A without handing me back my paper.
Father Buchanan had taken over as headmaster. I was sent to his office weekly for one infraction or another. He was always threatening to take me on a tour of city filling stations. There were scores of young men of onetime academic promise who now spent their days replenishing gas tanks and performing hasty lube jobs. They had been drummed out of their colleges for disciplinary reasons. He also served in a liaison capacity to that city on the sea, the isle of Rikers. Perhaps I’d like to take a midnight walk with him through the cell blocks and listen to the miscreants wailing for their mothers?
“When will we get another Negro?” I asked the father.
“Another Negro?” he said. “What you’re asking for is the pagan age in reverse.”
“I don’t understand, Father.”
“You’re asking that I throw another lion to the Christians.”
One night, I sneaked up onto Olympus and chalked out a crime-scene cutout of Tommy, prostrate at the foul line. Beneath the illustration, I wrote, in block letters, THE DEPOSITION FROM THE CROSS, implicating Otis. To make sure everyone got the point, I wrote beneath that, THE POSTMAN ONCE. I expected that I would be questioned about it, and I intended to lie. When it came to it, I couldn’t do it. I didn’t want anyone else to claim the credit. Buchanan said that Tommy’s death was analogous to the recent Kennedy killing and analogous also to original sin. We were all partly guilty, and we all had a partial price to pay. But I was persevering in paying much more than my fair share, and I was hell-bent on taking what had happened out of my own hide. What did I presume made me so special? Life was a series of trials, the last and least of which was death. At most of the deaths that Father Buchanan had attended, and he had seen his share, the dying had remarked upon how familiar the process seemed. Buchanan knew that I was a book reader, and so he leaned in close to my ear and stage-murmured the words, “The scch-hock of recognition.”
I had to go around and apologize to every instructor at Trinity individually. There wasn’t a nun on the job who was under the age of sixtyfive, and I had to remind each of them of what I had done, following my formal apology for the act itself. The reminders jogged their ire. How dare I, whippersnapper that I was, disrespect death from the perspective of having barely been born? Mayhew had a cubicle within the plasterboard labyrinth of the communal office pool. The same sculpted bride-of-Frankenstein hairdo that rendered her droll and eccentric in the classroom served to make her scary in private. She motioned for me to sit down on the folding chair of iron, so old and overused that it had the impression of a pair of buttocks embedded in its iron lap.
“Won’t you?” she said, extending her arm.
“Thank you, ma’am. I’ve come to tell you how sorry I am that—”
“Have you a girlfriend?”
“No, I don’t.”
“A motorcycle?”
“No.”
“Do you play a musical instrument?”
“No.”
“Do you paint or draw upon anything other than playgrounds?”
“No, I don’t.”
“Do you write poetry?”
“No.”
“What do you want to do with your life?”
“I don’t know.”
“Would you have me believe that your state of existence is, in itself, your act of rebellion?”
I was weary of these sorts of questions: they emphasized the long-term odds incumbent upon being a seriously flawed individual in a decidedly deficient world.
“I just came in to apologize about Tommy.”
She notched her glasses up her nose. “I want you to remember one thing,” she said.
“What’s that, ma’am?”
She reached behind her and took a slender book with a glazed white cover from the bookshelf. She handed it to me. “I would like you to try to remember that death is not a rebellion. Death is an orthodoxy.”
The book was Ariel by Sylvia Plath.
“Do you want this back, ma’am?”
I could see in the trembling of her lips that she wanted to smile. “When it is through with you,” she said.
We lived on Columbus and I had a crawl-space attic room to myself with a prismatic skylight, which I would imagine as being the portal of a spacecraft. It was a wondrous room to view a rainstorm from, but daunting to read in. Anything at all engaging swept away what limited oxygen there was in the room, and the command module of the brain, deprived of its accustomed atmosphere, would stray off onto a divergent pattern, making concentration impossible. I was much intimidated by libraries at that point. They were both constraining and overwhelming.
I found that landscape participated in reading. Narrative fiction was liable to be seasoned with the dramatic, or else the reverse was true: the vistas seen from a park bench at the half
-light of sundown chilled the exploits of Scaramouche and Hornblower for me, moderating them into the realm of believability. There was, and still is, a green and gravel, meticulously landscaped stonecutter’s paradise just off the Forty-ninth Street stop of the 7 train that stretched past the horizon, where prime real estate was doled out by the plot, and family members would find themselves separated by the happenstance of hillocks and turret-topped mausoleums. Freestanding surface-to-air putti drew their beads on the low-flying LaGuardia and Idlewild jets, and someone like me could pretend that he had come to read aloud to his perished grandfather from his favorite book. Even after visiting hours, I could usually get over by pleading my grief and acute sense of loss—the fence of the cemetery wasn’t five feet high and was designed to keep the dead shaded rather than the living out. The only time that I ever remember having difficulty was when a grounds guy with a hoe over his shoulder refused to believe that my granddad’s preferred work of nonfiction was Jacques Choron’s Death and Western Thought.
The rooftop of Olympus became hallowed ground after Tommy’s death. Basketball was disallowed for the remainder of the school year, and a six P.M. curfew was imposed. Wooden crates were borrowed from the grocers and nailed as obstructions over the hoops. A night watchman was hired. A gate was installed at the bottom of the stairs, and a padlock was put into place. I had to climb along the outside of the stairwell like Batman, holding on to the railing, stepping sideways in my bumpers across the concrete, steadily going more and more horizontal as I gained ground. I climbed with Mayhew’s volume of Ariel underneath my belt. When I got to the fence, I tossed it over the edge first, listening to gauge the drop in the darkness.
The security lights were on within the building. I could sit immured in a yellow beam and read the night away. As I had expected, I glimpsed, more than once, the broad, circumspect lapdog’s face of the watchman as he parted the vinyl cafeteria curtains and had his look into the night. I rolled behind the fire barrels when I saw him. I could hear the glass door opening. He undoubtedly mulled coming out and giving chase, but perhaps he didn’t want to waste the nocturnal effort on only one kid.
I had told my mom and dad that I would be staying over at Jimmy’s house that night. I wasn’t house-friendly with anyone named Jimmy.
“Go home!” the night watchman called.
No less a personage than Robert Lowell laid out the wolfsbane in the foreword. He informed me that Sylvia Plath was dead, although he left the cause of death to my imagination. From his tone, I did not gauge her death to be a natural one. Lowell was shaking his head and clucking his teeth in print, and also bating his own breath a little in envy. He was writing of a singularly worthy foe rather than a confederate, and it was apparent from his choice of words that he found it much easier to praise her after she had fallen.
The perspective of adolescence is unreclaimable outside that cocoon of pubescence, and the adolescent keenly knows this. The age is a medical condition, and it is terminable and curable. The adolescent rejects the life of his elders. He chafes under the perfection of his terminal condition. What has he ever lived through to deserve youth, and what is he being punished for by virtue of its mortality? His sense of impermanence, his sense of paradox, and his sense of loneliness all turn his thoughts toward the graveyard.
Sylvia’s Library of Congress birth and death dates described her as being thirty or thirty-one. Her voice was that of an adolescent with a mind abundantly older, but a sensibility much like that of the blackleotarded maidens whom I was constantly falling in love with in order to salve my sense of doom. She traveled regally, by means of the empty hazelnut and the moon’s watery beams, through the abstract terrain of a fifteen-year-old girl, except that she was not visiting these places with undue wonder and overawe. She was seeing them for the first time and with the knowing finality of one condemned. She visited museums, piano parlors, department stores, kitchens, sick wards, December windowseats, poppy gardens, bedrooms, wildwoods, beaches, nurseries, railroad depots, and bridal paths. It was all a journey by sleight of hand. At the end of the book, it became apparent that she had not gone anywhere at all. She was sitting in the umpire’s chair high above the starting gate and passing judgment on the human race itself. The second-to-last poem was called “Edge.” The last was called “Words.” Both concern the whetted stasis of silence. Both are prenatal in their sense of aphoristic and omniscient deliberation. Sylvia hadn’t gone anywhere, and she had not grown up. She had fashioned a sword of language, and she had aborted herself with it.
The wind swept the rain gutters of the taller Trinity buildings. A scintilla of brittle leaf buds whispered against the asphalt. A delivery truck sang out its shofar, and shadows rode along the walls. I looked at the sky and wondered whose lunar house this evanescent girl was sleeping over at tonight.
I didn’t drink coffee then, and there was no breakfast program at the school at the time. The buzz that I felt was pure deprivation. I had Miss Mayhew for second hour. At the beginning of class, I put my arm in the air.
“Yes?”
“May I ask what Sylvia Plath died of?”
“Carbon monoxide.” And she stepped closer and did not spare me her toilsome ridicule on the grounds that I had gone sleepless the night before. “A toxic,” Mayhew said, hitting it hard. “A toxic created when something of carbon burns in a dearth of air.”
“Oh,” I said. “Thank you.”
“Let’s turn to the final chapter in our blue books.”
10.
Ted
Ted took Assia over to the Greek and Roman galleries. She liked the ultramarine tint and the Victorian touch of the lace draperies, and she loved the heresy of the glass tanks wherein the busts, torsos, and fragments floated free from the corrosive fingers of school-tripping children. She mentioned something about seeing shelves of standby body parts, damaged almost beyond the point of transplant, swimming pickled in glass cisterns. During the war. Her war.
They glimpsed the livery-coated guards running sweeps in a phalanx in the adjacent gallery. The curfew was approaching. Not one word had to be spoken; such was the nexus of pure id and frivolity between the two of them. They split to the sides of the gallery and trawled the walls, hunching behind the display cases. Ted draped his carmine tie across the gold cordon that walled away two bisquey Nereid twins while Assia left one of her black cavalier pumps on the cube that housed the head of Cybele. She dolled her pleated, tear-away skirt upon the shoulder of Heracles, the garment dangling down like an amputated sleeve. The guards, pensioned-off, girder-necked quarrymen, left with nothing better to do but to moonlight against their limitless leisure, marched through the galleries, all of them visored by routine. The woven sash of Assia’s leggings hung from the neck of Pandora. Ted dumped his trousers in a puddle upon the steps of a dwarf temple of Hadrian. The guards passed without noticing a thing. The echo of their standard-issue oxfords dallied in the air like light artillery.
They were nearly naked when they reached the rear sanctuary with the vaulted ceiling and the beveled, ashen skylight. The neutral London moon antiquated and enameled their skin tones. They were holding in their laughter, circling each other, Assia mocking the pigeon bias of Ted’s toes. His patchy black body hair seemed an unapt afterthought, and his belly lacked the rippling girdle of the stone Apollos that stood posturing about in their obvious rancor at being taunted the day-long with effortless mobility. But he was easily the size of one of the great, naked Gauls, loitering in their separate rage in the outer rooms. She swung the satiny oyster of her handbag at him in play. He saw a moonbeam flash by. In the center of the room, a colossal lioness stood sentry, with a forward spring, over eternity, despite the barbering of erosion that exposed a chafing fungus upon her bare hide. There were horse fragments in a teardrop capsule. A snout, a pectoral, a hank of mane, and a quarter hoof, making up the restored couplets of an equine poem.
It was only a frolic. They really hadn’t taken seriously the idea of stowing away in the be
lly of this ancient storehouse. Ted, for one, had, if not a fear, then a healthy respect for ghosts. Someone was pushing an elephantine cart across the floor above them, bruising the atmosphere. He looked at Assia. Her upper lip curled, and the metrical cay of her top teeth came into view. They both looked away at the same time, hearing the sound of leaden doors slamming. Assia took off her sunglasses.
It had only been a lark, all along. A joke with a portentously dangling punch line. They hadn’t had dinner. Assia, like red meat, was best assimilated with great helpings of grog. She put her sunglasses in the pouch of her cleavage. Her long, ice-wicked fingers fluttered wanly, beckoning him halfheartedly to come.
11.
Sylvia
She turns atop the stone bust on the marble table, fitting the idol for a new hat with alternately the split of her sex and the split of her anus. The rapturous and mournful music on the radio brings to mind happy endings and untimely deaths in the movies. The music fugues with the very un-British wind that moans at the windows and somehow even manages to embitter the dishes in the breakfront. Bad-self Sylvia, as she has termed her twin, is orbiting the room, powerless, or more accurately too bemused to intervene. There is something distinctly feline in the elasticity of Sylvia’s spine. One might expect her to leap to the higher perch of the rosewood bookshelf at any instant. Instead she grinds down with the withering rhythm of a weary metronome. Finally, she is no longer dancing, but miming the opening of a morning glory. There are several clocks about. If she would turn down the music and the ambient static of her mind, she would hear the percussion of the Black Forest cuckoo in the corner, a gift of an admirer of Ted’s poetry and virility. But time after dark hardly exists for Sylvia, until the light begins to seep through the blinds and one of her babies cries out for her breast. Or they may find their dreams too sweet to take leave of, and thus her unsucked breasts will be heavy and sullen with the dawn, foreshadowing the drawn-out day.
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