I thought of my record “What Makes Rain,” in which gleeful little droplets are converted by the sun into clouds and sing happily as they fall back onto the earth into thirsty flowers, rivers, and seas. Could I turn my own pangs of terror into harmless vapors as easily?
I asked Dr. Fabian where I hid things. After all, there was only me and I knew about myself.
“In wet pants,” he replied, “in daydreams, and in fears. Richard’s unconscious self makes decisions for him too.”
It seemed absurd that some person inside me would cause me to wet my pants and conceal stuff to my detriment. Why would I sabotage myself? Finding a way through this subterfuge was our next order of business.
In the first dream we studied, I was arranging a chemistry set. The flask suddenly cracked in my hands and I was running down the hall to throw it in the toilet bowl, but I was too late. A burning liquid spilled through my fingers onto my legs. That, Dr. Fabian told me, was a symbol; it combined urine and poison. Nanny’s warnings about infecting myself with my own pee had turned it into an acid that I failed to dispose of in time. “This dream by itself doesn’t answer the big question,” he explained, “but it tells us many important things; for instance that there’s a relationship between your wetting and your fears.”
I was delighted by his clever deciphering and I tested it in my mind over and over again. It fit as perfectly as a solution in the back of a puzzle book. “What figures go together? Which one doesn’t match? What’s the only path through the maze?” Peeing was not peeing, poison was not poison; even fear was not fear. Bedwetting was an unconscious deed, committed in the darkness of sleep, but it left a rebus, a chain as incremental and traceable as those in the game of Telephone.
Week by week a dream landscape unfolded. Bob, the mean counselor from Swago, represented Daddy—he had the same first name. My mother was a giant wounded bird. My brother was a scruffy, black dog who clamped his teeth onto my arm so that I couldn’t pull it away. Dr. Fabian was flattered to find himself a magician, then General Manager of the Yankees.
The most surprising interpretation involved St. Louis Cardinal outfielder Enos Slaughter, who appeared as a Bill-Dave counselor. After free connection Dr. Fabian concluded that his name referred to Dr. Hitzig and he was trying to tell us about the dungeon stairs. “How’d you like to have a name like that?” he ad-libbed, disappointed that I hadn’t caught onto the bloodshed at once. To me Enos Slaughter was just another player on a card until Dr. Fabian decoded him.
Symbols gradually made fissures in a reality that had seemed till then impassive and beyond appeal. The unconscious was everywhere, so it transformed the world. My mother was no longer either a monster and tyrant or a decent woman under attack by ungrateful children; she was trapped by her own fears and problems, more sphinx than harpy. Bullies at school and in group, though they pretended to be kings of the universe, controlled nothing; they didn’t even know who they were or why they were doing stuff.
Years before I was capable of understanding symbolic thought, let alone information theory, I had its rudiments installed in me by psychiatric transference. Through Dr. Fabian’s affection for me, his intention to rescue a troubled child, he handed over the key to the arbitrary link between two unconscious messages that generate each other. Of course, he couldn’t teach me something that subtle, so he imbued it by his sheer desire that I know. I didn’t grasp its myriad nuances, but I got its simple, raw essence. In fact, I got it so profoundly that a part of my life thereafter became interpreting events, using symbols as clues.
Yes, I was behind in class and a misfit, but I was solving real puzzles. Plus to everyone’s surprise, my daytime wetting stopped, confirming Dr. Fabian’s method.
I was still in the watchtower, but I was acquiring the tools of a wizard.
My mother tried to reestablish her authority over the psychiatrist, sending away for a booklet advertised in the Daily News: “How to Conquer Your Fears.” It was a stapled pamphlet with cartoons illustrating individual fears. Each had a number of points. Starting with the lowest-rated one, you strove to achieve a better score over weeks by making your mind master a fear at a time. The highest was “Fear of Failure,” fifty points’ worth. I didn’t have that one. By comparison, fear of disease was only five. That was a ridiculously low grade, a tipoff to the ignorance of the author! There were also fears I had never heard of; for instance, fear of being buried alive. That recalled the Cisco Kid’s poisoned blankets (not on the list) and led me to obsess about coffins.
I told my mother that the pamphlet only gave me new fears and that I knew from Dr. Fabian using your will and keeping score wasn’t the way you got rid of fears. “The reasons they are there are unconscious,” I explained to her. “You can’t just tell them to go away.”
She was infuriated. “It helps thousands of people but not him,” she shouted to no one in particular. “After all, he’s not like the rest of us; he’s special.”
She was in the majority. In truth, no one else seemed to act as though Dr. Fabian’s symbols existed—not my teacher, not Bill-Dave counselors, none of my uncles or aunts.
I wore my Yankee pinstripes into the winter at Bill-Dave, an overcoat on top, refusing to play soccer or football, carrying a glove and a hardball, ready to have a catch with anyone who dared join me in the snow. Well into February I portered these items, more as totems than useful props since no one was willing. Even if someone had wanted to play and could tolerate the sting of a hardball in freezing temperatures, it was just too weird. My schoolmates worshipped conformity; in the fifties it was our state religion. “Don’t be a dope,” everyone said without having to say it. “No one plays baseball in the snow.” I did.
Despite the entreaties of Bill and the other counselors, I never conceded a scrap of loyalty to the other sports. I refused to play imposter games with their leathery blimpballs and bumptious thuds. Baseball was my alias. When no one played with me, I threw the ball in the air and caught it, over and over.
A dope I was—an obstinacy I regretted years later because I would love to have bounced a basketball to an open teammate or stepped in front of an opponent to intercept a pass, skills and moves I forfeited forever. I didn’t dare look at what was going on around me, risk seeing my place in it. I was cutting an ugly, trenchant shape, yet one I had to have.
It was never about fun or success; it was about survival. Before my selfhood was assured, I had to fight a life-and-death struggle for every morsel of it, within an oppressive society, in a jealous family, in aggressive schools and camps. I had to safeguard my psyche by the strictness of my intent.
I got something untellable by showing up with a glove and ball out of season, for I was engaged in a ritual far more ancient and serious than baseball.
In fact, the official American League amulet with its red-zippered coat proved a disappointment when Jonny and I completed our dissection of a cowhide that got scuffed and was coming apart anyway. After we cut and removed the glossy white veil, we found only yarn around cork: a puny little paddle-ball. Yet an untarnished baseball was an inviolable symbol, a touchstone that opened an enchanted realm. Though we had split a real one, we hadn’t touched the thing it stood for.
Baseball was a voice that never stopped talking to me. I was lost without box scores, daily averages and standings, without Mel Allen to remind me who we all were and where this was taking place. His mantra, rising and falling in swaths of revelation as the game progressed, was a broadcast from the homeland to a child in exile, issuing a password through the great dark, when there was no other.
I remember as if yesterday Daddy, Jonny, and me sitting on a park bench in high suspense, waiting for Irv Noren to take his turn as a pinch-hitter—two on, two out in the eighth, two runs down. When he doubled into the corner, the three of us jumped up and down, hugging each other, as Mel Allen crooned the hymn of redemption.
A child’s parable, a phonograph record called “Little Johnny Strikeout,” told my story through a gl
ass darkly. In this fairy tale Joe DiMaggio, without revealing his identity, approached a kid my age after a game he happened to observe while strolling in Central Park. To the jeers of his friends Johnny had just struck out for the third straight time while DiMaggio stopped to watch (“Little Johnny Strikeout,” the chorus sang, “he can’t hit the ball!”). The despondent boy was on his way home alone when DiMaggio got his attention and convinced him to stay a bit longer and take a lesson from him. After some whiffs, a bit of instruction, and a few hopeful foul tips—suddenly, smack! You can imagine the scene the next day when Joe showed up again as a passing spectator, and, after the usual taunting chorus, Johnny hit a home run to win the game. Afterwards (“Say, who is that friend of yours, Johnny?”), the Yankee Clipper disclosed his identity to the ovations of the kids.
One day Dr. Fabian asked me an ordinary question about Daddy. When I answered, he startled me by his response. “No, I mean your real father.”
I considered this for a while. Was it a trick, another kind of symbol?
No, not the way he posed it. I grinned playfully and said, “Daddy is Daddy. Don’t you know, Bob Towers?” He had never met Daddy, so anything was possible; yet it hardly seemed like a confusion he would have.
“Not Bob Towers. Don’t you know Bob Towers isn’t your father?”
I shook my head. This game made me goofy, but something about it rang true. I thought, “Martha Towers, Richard Towers, Jonathan Towers, Deborah Towers. Not my father?” It was a riddle, but it was more than the riddle. It was a changing stage set in a darkened theater. What would I see when the lights came on?
“I think you know who your father is.”
I sorted back through memories until I was arrived at the Easter egg in the bush. I looked at the face of the one who had rehid it. I felt a shock of recognition. He couldn’t be just an uncle—this man who sang with me at the Penny Arcade, who knew the Yankees in person. “Uncle Paul?”
“Right. Paul is your father. I asked you because I wanted to see if you knew.”
I pondered this for a moment. Did I really know, or was it the only plausible guess?
“It was there all along,” Dr. Fabian said, “in your unconscious mind.”
As the universe wobbled to let Uncle Paul shift denomination, he seemed oddly overdressed in his new role, too sartorial to be my Dad. I tried to hold him there, but he slipped away because there was nothing to connect me to him in the way I was joined irrefutably to my mother. Why had I guessed it? I didn’t look or act like him: he was large, fat, and gregarious, a walking fortress. I was small and sinewy and shy. I hadn’t earned such a grand, noble father, and he didn’t deserve such a wee, inadequate son.
“Is that why he comes to our house?” I finally asked.
“Yes, you are his child. Bob is Jonny’s father,” he continued. “That’s why Uncle Paul takes you out alone. Your mother tried to keep him out of your life. But he loved you so much he kept coming, even against her wishes.” The world was turning boundaryless. “He’s the reason you see me,” Dr. Fabian continued. “He found me and pays for me. Your mother would never permit it.”
Then he explained how, after the tests at the hospital showed that I wasn’t brain-damaged but emotionally disturbed, she decided to get Uncle Paul involved. “Before she learned you were sick she was very jealous of your father. She wanted you for herself. But once you were damaged goods she didn’t mind if he shared you. She thought it might be costly, that you might need medical care and a special school. She knew he would pay for it.”
Revelation upon revelation! But I was willingly borne along.
Dr. Fabian had unmasked my father partly because he wanted me to spend more time with him. From then on, Uncle Paul planned an evening together every month. His phone call announcing the occasion was more glorious than a birthday. “Richard,” he would say in his big voice, as if he had just discovered me, “how’d you like to get together?”
“Yay!”
My mother would put me in my best clothes and send me in a cab to the Plaza where my father stayed. With newfound confidence I marched down lobbies of chandeliers into quiet elevators that opened onto grand hallways. Uncle Paul’s room number was the key to happiness.
He met me at the door to his suite. Then we went out on the town, returning most often to the Penny Arcade where I progressed to air hockey (rotating guns blowing a ping-pong-like ball back and forth into slots for goals) and racing each other in imitation cars against landscapes that rolled by on drums.
Once, he took me to the Silver Skates at Madison Square Garden. At the start of the longest-distance race he told me to keep my eyes on a contestant he sponsored named Ray Blum. Wearing a blue and white jersey with the name “Grossinger’s” diagonally across it, his skater dropped behind and stayed in last, even as the contestants entered the final few laps. I felt sorry for him. “You watch,” Uncle Paul promised. “Ray always saves his run till it counts. He’s conserving his energy.”
I was sure he was wrong; yet, moments after he said that, Blum began to pick up speed. He caught the other skaters one by one. We cheered together as he ate up ground in great strides, streaking past the leaders as they were standing still.
Sometimes we ordered dinner by room service. I could choose anything from the menu. I usually ordered steak or liver with onion rings, pie with ice cream for dessert. “A la mode,” Uncle Paul called it.
I had a real father now, but Daddy had been my father for so long that the setup didn’t take. Daddy acted like a Daddy. He helped me with my homework and taught me to play baseball. Uncle Paul was more like a king who left his castle now and then.
The effect of Uncle Paul becoming my father was the nullification of the word itself. He didn’t seem like my father, so I could never call him Daddy. As hard as I tried, I couldn’t get the name out. I always encountered a pause mid-word, a lapse of intonation. So I didn’t call him anything.
Yet I couldn’t call Daddy Daddy anymore and I also couldn’t call him Uncle Bob—so I called him nothing too. For the remainder of my childhood I maneuvered between raindrops, timing my cadences, offsetting my phrasing in advance so as never to stumble into the word: “Daddy.”
Usually my outings with my father were planned in advance, but on three occasions he surprised me by showing up at P.S. 6 after school. The first time we took a cab and met the governor at a cocktail party, then went across the Bridge to Newark Airport where we watched planes take off and land. Great roars preceded the transition to flight, soft touchdowns and promenades in the other direction. We continued to look through a picture window during dinner while they served a dazzling dessert: coconut-covered ice-cream balls carried across the darkened room with sparklers.
After that excursion, I searched every day for Uncle Paul beside the Bill-Dave wagon. Twice I rushed toward him in the crowds, only to find another fat man.
Then on an afternoon when I had forgotten to look, there he was, talking to Bill by the wagon. He hugged me and shouted at a cab. We went straight from P.S. 6 to a rehearsal with Eddie Fisher and later dined at a restaurant called Stockholm that had large figures of carved ice around a buffet.
Paul Grossinger was an enigma. Grand and important, smelling of perfume and outfitted in the fanciest suits (PG on his pockets and shirt cuffs), he moved awkwardly, bumping into people, and was often tongue-tied. Though he had both his eyes, I was astonished to learn that he had lost total sight in one. “A kid shot me with a beebee,” he said with surprising irritation over something that had happened when he was younger than me.
In the course of our visits he quizzed me about schoolwork and asked repeatedly if my behavior was improving. “That’s not what I hear from your mother!” he would retort with a wave of a finger. But then he’d chuckle.
He usually had inside scoops from Yankee players and executives, but if I pressed him too much on these, he acted as though he were guarding top-secret information and changed the subject. He preferred to describe his ho
tel: swimming pool, eighteen holes of golf, ice-skating, and a dining room that could hold five Plaza dining rooms. He mentioned his wife, Aunt Bunny, and my brothers, Michael and James. “You three will raise some hell!”
I didn’t plan on that, but I was dying to meet them.
Though he addressed me in baby language and barely listened to what I said, he was sententiously reassuring, promising that between him and Dr. Fabian all my problems, including my fears, would soon be gone. With his huge belly and soft, round face he reminded me of Babe Ruth, and he had such a warmth and generosity that I wanted to be with him always. I was teary in the cab going home, though he handed me too much money for the fare and told me to keep the change. I would return to icy stares from everyone, even Bridey. It was as though I had been consorting with a convict. My seeming willingness to “be bought” was further proof to them of my selfishness and disloyalty.
On holiday weekends Daddy got his Mercury from the garage and took the whole family, Bridey included, into the countryside three hours to the Nevele. Our room was old-fashioned, with metal beds, fancy quilts, and a singing radiator. In the morning we accompanied our parents to the dining room where folded cloth napkins made goblets into tall birds alongside baskets of hot breakfast rolls and stacks of pancakes.
Daddy’s first order of business was to lead us into the back room to pay our respects to Uncle Ben and Aunt Marian, the owners. Their space was smoky and crowded, people crouching over ledgers. Like the operator of a saloon Aunt Marian rose to greet us with strong handshakes. She gave Mommy a long, concerned hug: “How are you, Martha dear?” Her husky Ethel Merman voice carried innuendos of both rivalry and solicitude. Marian Slutsky was a powerful statuesque lady—Daddy’s boss, Mommy’s confidante, a formidable rival to Uncle Paul. In her presence Mommy acted meek and seemed about to cry.
New Moon Page 8