New Moon

by Richard Grossinger

  As at Dr. Fabian’s, I was touching the wan edges of exorcism without recognition.

  I dreamed of going beneath into grottos where I saw a deactivated dungeon. Half decayed, it was once stately, even beautiful.

  Though I was glad for the mitigation, these dreams didn’t fix me—dereliction was never an antidote to terror. The form that gave rise to the dungeon was illimitable, so it could stage other ambushes, machinations more macabre and hideous.

  Somehow between between Towers household spooks and Grossinger’s version of paradise, my terror of the void and my spunk in standing up against the rabbis—between the Park Avenue Synagogue and the nether side of 96th Street—I found a viable minyan.

  At Christmas that year I got the only present I cared about—to return to Grossinger’s. Uncle Paul invited Larry Abelman, my counselor, and his new bride Jackie to take care of me there the first few days.

  On the much awaited afternoon my mother remained in her bedroom; she would not come out to say goodbye, so I went down in the elevator with my suitcase to wait on the sidewalk. Joe had already picked up my counselor, so Larry and Jackie were in the back seat when he pulled up. What a strange transposition this was: my counselor and his wife in my grandfather’s car! We inched along crowded streets across the George Washington Bridge onto the highway north. Until major roads reached the Catskills it was a three-hour journey, most of it on old Route 52. I passed the time by racing Larry and Jackie to find letters in the shifting landscape in order from A to Z, hunting for “Antiques,” “Exit,” and “Pizza” at prime moments. We dashed through the alphabet three times, each of us winning once. Joe pulled over at the approximate midpoint, the Red Apple Rest, a sprawling truck stop upgraded to a restaurant, and treated us to cherry pie.

  In the mountains the world was bright with crystals and dunes of snow.

  Arriving at dusk, we were directed to our rooms on the third floor of my father’s house. In the morning we ate breakfast at the Hotel and then hiked across the snow-covered golf course all the way to the Lake where people sat on chairs, fishing through holes in the ice.

  There was extra excitement that afternoon because Whitey Ford was rumored to be at the skating rink with his wife. I hastened Larry and Jackie through lunch so we could go see. At the rink, Selma, who was in charge of the skate shop, stepped out of her office to fit us. As I rose in the strange footwear, I found it a chore to balance on its narrow blades while making my way along the carpeted floor, down the stairs to a rubber pad. Once on the ice, I stumbled beside the railing while Jackie held my hand.

  Holding my arm, Irving Jaffee, the pro, gave me a brief lesson in gliding, which concluded with his presenting me, Paul’s son, to Whitey Ford. We shook hands with mittens. Then I edged alongside the blond Yankee, amazed to be looking up and seeing his visage in an overcoat rather than pinstripes, having him right me when I fell, though he was having a hard time keeping his own balance. “Casey’s gonna kill me,” he announced, “if I break my left arm.” Back at P.S. 6 I told that to an astonished Phil. Afterwards Whitey conducted a baseball clinic around the fireplace, and I impressed everyone by asking questions about Yankee farmhands.

  The next day Larry got his movie camera, and we went to the toboggan, a frozen track on the hillside behind the rink. There he directed a short film in which we were the actors. He called it “The Human Cannonball.” First, he stood at the bottom and filmed Jackie and me going up the hill alongside other guests on a rope-drawn trolley. Then he followed behind as we ascended a ramp into an elevated hut warmed by a fire in a metal barrel. There a gruff dwarf in an overcoat, ear-muffs, and a scarf that made him seem to have no neck packed people onto long flat sleds and sent them flying out the chute. My boots were lugged forward into Jackie’s lap as she gripped them. I held on so tight I could barely see. With the dwarf’s shove we shot out the opening and, in exhilaration (a pinch of fright too), we seemed to fly, as the friction of wood on ice made a satisfying hum. I kept my head buried in Jackie’s coat, air nipping my cheeks and ears. We were slowing on the straightaway when we crashed into bales of hay. Larry ran toward us with the camera and filmed as we got to our feet, brushing off stalks.

  On the next trip he sat in the front of the toboggan, braving the cold as he held the lens out.

  My hands were numb by the time we headed to the canteen for milk shakes and cookies. The place was a hubbub, filled with cigarette smoke and chatter. On the way home we passed Grandpa Harry. He stood by a construction site, observing men putting up scaffolding, yelling orders to them, the collar of his overcoat pulled up tight around his chin. “You keepin’ warm?” he asked me. “Look at those gloves. They aren’t warm enough! Are your feet dry? Those boots are no good.” He turned to Larry. “Get him others. Charge ’em to me.”

  Later I visited him in his room, the door on the left at the rear of Grandma’s house, where he sat in stiff dignity in a blue shirt, underpants, and suspenders, watching a boxing match on TV. In his heavily accented Elmer Fudd voice he asked me, how’s my mother, how’s Bobtowers, does he miss Grossinger’s, do I remember when he and Joe used to come by with lollipops and chocolate spoons?

  I did.

  “Your mother nearly bit my head off, that’s what!”

  Day after day in Uncle Paul’s living room, presents piled up for Michael and James, countless boxes left by guests and clients. On Christmas morning Michael got exhausted opening them, then surly, as machines didn’t work right or came without batteries. “Junk!” he cried, throwing stuff against the walls. Aunt Bunny put an end to this tantrum, saying, “Enough of them there apples.” She took us outside to build a snowlady, providing some of her own clothes for realism. Then, to my astonishment, she started a snowball fight with Michael and me. She got right into the thick of it and hit me three times with solid shots.

  My visits to Grossinger’s were a treachery for which my mother never forgave me. She had uncommon discipline to look at me for the remainder of my childhood as if I were Benedict Arnold and Judas combined.

  When I reported my ice-skating with Whitey Ford, she subtly baited Daddy to draw him in. “You hear that? He needs to be told the facts.”

  “Who do you imagine brought ballplayers to Grossinger’s in the first place?” he asked. I acknowledged that it must have been him. “They live off the success of Bob Towers,” he said. “And they parade around second-rate idiots like Lou Goldstein in my place. They’re going to destroy their reputation in one generation.”

  “He thinks everything’s going to be handed to him, just the way it is at Grossinger’s,” she rejoined. “Well, it’s not. It’s dog-eat-dog out there.”

  “Amen,” declared my stepfather.

  When I told Uncle Paul about these comments, he heard them unperturbedly, a tinge of annoyance but mostly amusement and disdain. He said my mother and Daddy were jealous. He was particularly provoked by the idea that Bob had made Grossinger’s and could do a better job running it. “You tell my old buddy Bob Towers,” he chuckled, “that any time he wants to set up his own hotel and go into competition with us, I’ll be glad to meet him on even terms.” He seemed delighted by the challenge. “Richard, you should know that people like Bob are second-rate grumblers. They can’t be big enough on their own so they complain about others’ success. There’s no reason for you to believe him. You’re a Grossinger yourself and that’s something he can never be.” I stared at his gold PG cuff links. He cut such a giant figure with governors, movie stars, and ballplayers that I wondered if I could ever attain his level of prestige. “Your mother never wanted to leave,” he finally added. “Me, yes! The Hotel, no! She and Bob would love to have remained at Grossinger’s, but actions come with a price. Sour grapes. That’s all it is.”

  Sour grapes? I had an image of little blue barrels of candy, but I sensed that Uncle Paul didn’t appreciate the degree of oppression I was under. I pleaded to live at his house, but he told me that wasn’t possible. “Of course, I want you to, but the law
says otherwise, and you and I have to obey the law.”

  During the next attack on Uncle Paul I argued back and defended him. Mommy’s and Daddy’s screaming got louder and louder until their clamor in close quarters began to crack my brain. I ran down all six flights of stairs out onto the street and continued around the block, fantasizing that I’d see the Hotel car and it would pick me up. Every doorway and alley attracted me, but in the end, of course, I returned.

  “How could you scare me like that?” Mommy shrieked.

  “Do you know what you’re doing to your mother?” Daddy added, turning his back and walking away. “You’re killing her.”

  I was the Prince of Darkness in that household, a representative of a hostile foreign country. “The devil,” Jonny said in retrospect after we were both grown up. “You were the devil. Everything you did was wrong because you were, like, from hell. All your friends were demons or thieves. You were crazy because you had to go to that doctor all the time. Only it wasn’t a real doctor; it was like learning to be more evil. You were always undermining Mom and Dad’s authority, explaining why they really did things. You had a way to get at them because you knew all this stuff from the outside. And you had this other family of rich bad guys.”

  The third time I went to Grossinger’s, during Easter vacation, I was sent with Gail, Daddy’s oldest niece, plus a kid my age also named Richard, the son of one of my mother’s friends.

  Uncle Paul and Aunt Bunny were travelling in the Caribbean with Michael and James, yet my mother wanted me to go partly because they weren’t there but also because she had promised a free trip to Grossinger’s to the parents of both my alleged companions. When I balked, she rebuked me with “Would you deprive your cousin of a chance to find a husband?”

  Upon arrival Gail got a social calendar and went off looking for men, so I was left alone with Richard, one of the worst kids I had ever met. He had a “torture kit,” as he called it, a tiny leather pouch of pins and blades. He would regularly threaten to “punish” me if I did not show him the proper deference. Actually, except for the occasional stab of a pin, he resorted to his full array of tools only once, when I was beating him in Monopoly. Suddenly he reached across the board and grabbed my $500s, $100s, and property cards.

  When I protested, he took out the kit, unzipped it, and began scratching my arm, muttering in a theatrically sinister voice, “You want to argue with me knife?” I called for help, but Gail, who was reading a magazine, told us to settle it ourselves. Then he twisted my arm behind my back until I agreed, in increasing agony, that he had won fair and square. That was the last time I let my mother cast my trips to Grossinger’s.

  As for Richard, I knew only that his mother died from cancer a few years later after giving birth to a girl, an event that sent my mother into a tailspin of panics. I forgot about them until thirty years later when a college acquaintance became the piano teacher of Richard’s grown-up little sister and discovered that her brother had once been my “friend.” “Not quite,” I wrote to him, explaining why Richard was not a fond childhood memory.

  “Your letter gave me the chills,” he responded. “Do you know what became of your tormentor? He’s now in the upper echelon of counterintelligence for the Army. Obviously, he started young!”

  6

  RIDDLES AND CLUES

  During the spring of fourth grade Phil and I began reading Hardy Boys mysteries together. The series began with hidden loot of The Tower Treasure, a first edition of which I found covered with dust in Aunt Marian’s library at the Nevele like a collector’s cherished stamp. “It’s yours now,” she declared. It ended thirty-four volumes later with The Hooded Hawk Mystery in which the two teen detectives use a tamed bird to break a crime ring.

  Each Hardy Boys cover was a panel of mystery, a portal that dissolved into the landscape of Bayport with a cliff-hanger, the rustic scenery as compelling as the plot. There was something simultaneously old-fashioned and modern, dreamlike and real about the stories: covert houses, hidden chests, underwater rocks, abandoned islands, smuggling rings, racehorse kidnappers.

  When we got through all of the available Hardy Boys to date we moved on to Rick Brant, Tom Swift, Tom Quest, Ken Holt, even Nancy Drew—other young sleuths brooking mysterious landscapes.

  When a perspicacious lad (or girl) discovered an unused bus ticket, a piece of suspicious cargo, a trinket, a tribal mask, or a torn map, it was both a marker and rune, the start of a suspenseful chain that led to haunted bridges, leaning chimneys, boats buried among bushes, amulets of grinning tigers, and humming gypsy dolls (that weren’t dolls). I would save my money and wait outside the bookstore across Madison from P.S. 6 for the silver-haired lady to appear around the corner five minutes before the school bell—like a comet she showed up at that precise time every day. After she unlocked the door, I followed her into the papyrus-scented alcove, picked the next volume from its shelf, gave her my dollar, and ran to class.

  Phil and I sank so deeply into the genre that we began writing and illustrating our own versions combining characters from different series. Phil dreamed up one ingenious plot in which Rick Brant, Ken Holt, Tom Swift, and the others got recruited into the same case but were unwittingly helping the crooks. Event after event was scribbled on our yellow pads, an occasional full-page illustration with a caption like “They had vanished without a trace.”

  Then the two of us went searching for clues at lunchtime. On one such occasion we found a silver watch on a chain with a small plastic skull attached to it on the street—a remarkable object under the circumstances—and, by deduction, attributed it to a nearby apartment building where we tried to decode the engraving on the watch by matching it to names of tenants on mailboxes. It would have worked for Frank and Joe Hardy, but it didn’t for us. We must have gotten in too deep because a policeman arrived at the lobby, listened to our tale, and told us that we could collect the watch from the City lost-and-found if no one claimed it within a month.

  Riddles and clues were my forte, whether in detective novels, puzzle books, or Interpretation of Dreams. My case with Dr. Fabian was the best and most suspenseful mystery of all, for he was searching for the clue that would unlock the secret of me. I knew by then that he was a highly regarded psychiatrist with famous patients and that he considered me a first-rate enigma. In fact, I came to see myself as his toughest challenge ever because the dungeon stairs felt as indecipherable and unfathomable to him as they did to me. I was the equivalent of a secret panel or flashing lighthouse and we were hundreds of pages in without a verdict in sight.

  My trails of clues were more furtive and baffling than those followed by the Hardy Boys, for they led inside the world. I imagined their “source” as being like a pot of gold in a fairy tale: a cache of symbolic coins from the early days of Nanny, a rebus-like glass of apple juice at sunset, a primal egg in a bush, or something forgotten long ago. Since I had no idea what clues Dr. Fabian needed I volunteered as much as I could. I rattled off my weekly tales, updating him on my mother, P.S. 6, Bill-Dave, Grossinger’s, while providing strings of hopeful symbols and Hardy Boys–like traces and tips, from vagrant shapes on ceilings and brick walls to patterns seen in bubbles of urine while peeing. Detective novels had shown me how subtle and indirect an indication might be.

  I could not see through my own veils to any sort of clarity or resolution, no hint of a shape or even a promising shadow. So I kept delivering fresh intelligence. I hoped that Dr. Fabian, with his greater powers of discernment, was on the case and making progress, that one day he would leap from behind his desk like a scientist in a comic book and shout “Eureka! I’ve got it.” Then my mystery would be solved and I would be reconciled and happy.

  My life became a story I told—a more primitive version of the one I am telling now. The members of my family were its characters. I was the main character (as well as the narrator): a troubled boy talking to a wise doctor.

  My fears were invoked so regularly they became characters too, in
variable abstractions with personalities. “I’m afraid of being poisoned,” I said. “I’m afraid of being kidnapped. I’m afraid of getting cancer.” I played along but I was fatalistic. That any of these could be cured by a medicine made of words seemed ridiculous, for I continued to sense how trenchantly my symptoms were rooted. What abracadabra would rip them out, what elixir dissolve them?

  My splurges of thoroughness and candor changed nothing. I wet my bed just as much. I still had impromptu panics, bottomless in their scope and range of representation. I didn’t keen or do jigs in the hall anymore, though I felt the same stampede of desperation.

  It was better if Mommy and Daddy didn’t know; they only made uninformed and exasperated comments or, even worse, blamed Dr. Fabian for his incompetence. I carried my terror silently like a gremlin I dare not disclose. Sometimes I curled up around it on my bed, girdling and containing its throb with my whole being.

  More profound than any of the threats, I experienced a lesion, a place with no content at all.

  “You are afraid that something terrible is going to happen to you!” Dr. Fabian finally declared. That was his firm professional conclusion. He announced it one day triumphantly like the long-awaited eureka. Then he repeated the refrain so many times over the years that it became like a proverb or maxim, the lyrics to a tuneless song. Its oracular ring held the gist and upshot of my whole situation, almost biblical in tenor, but what did it actually mean?

  Not long after his revelation our quest took an unexpected turn. At the start of a session Dr. Fabian gave me a rare treat: a vanilla ice-cream cup. I was digging at the hard cream with the flat wooden spoon when I suddenly worried that the black specks were poison. It seemed ridiculous to have such a confusion, let alone in his presence. I knew that vanilla made black specks in ice cream, but I couldn’t stem my surge of terror.