New Moon
Page 14
Pleased with the opportunity to work on a panic directly, Dr. Fabian tried in vain to get inside my thinking. Then he suggested we do free connection on the specks. Okay: “seed,” “tree,” “apple,” “orchid,” “baby,” aha! He surmised that I was worried about eating seeds and getting pregnant. Folllowing his hunch, he drew detailed diagrams on a sheet of paper, explaining the process of conception—the role of the penis and the vagina, the fertilization and growth of the egg. This was to establish that boys were in no danger of being inseminated by specks in ice cream.
I listened dutifully, but I had already heard this stuff from kids at school. Dr. Fabian may have been satisfied that he had solved the mystery of the ice-cream cup, but I knew better. I preferred to play dumb, not acknowledge the error even to myself. I needed him to be perfect. After all, I relied on him for proof of who I was. If he didn’t know what was going on, I was in big trouble indeed, alone with stuff like dismemberment of my body and the dungeon stairs—a kid in a canoe without a paddle, headed for Niagara Falls.
We could only get so far with “You afraid that something terrible is going to happen to you” because, however weighty and portentous it sounded when he intoned it, all it added to the fears was a mysterious hovering specter. Then a few months later, Dr. Fabian solved that guise too, settling on a surprisingly tame origin for such an elemental augur: the terrible thing had already happened—it was the divorce of my parents.
That didn’t seem sufficient either, nowhere near the gravitas I felt, but he was so convinced that he pushed it with all his authority. Since I trusted him, I became reconciled to my parents’ divorce as the main culprit in a “crime” committed hundreds of pages back that gave rise to all my twists of plot. It was apparently formidable enough to launch full-blown panics, for it bound a mysterious intrinsic power belying its relative blandness. To my mind a divorce was paltry and overt, cherry-pie by comparison to a “coiled cobra,” “crisscross shadow,” or “sinister signpost.” Plus, by Dr. Fabian’s logic, its deposition should have caused my fears and bedwetting to stop.
They didn’t. Nothing changed.
Dr. Fabian never got past this signature revelation. Once framed, he made it our singular philosophy and sovereign agenda. He applied it not only to bed-wetting and panics but to dreams and relationships, and he always made it fit. Session by session as I continued to tell my story, he found ways to reshape it along the authorized line—that my troubles arose from a Martha-Paul sundering that split not only my family but my identity.
I abided by Dr. Fabian’s verdict for years, spouting his mythology to Aunt Bunny and anyone else worthy of hearing. Only later did I realize how slack his interpretation, how random its applications. He was oddly making the same mistake that Phil and I had with our watch and skull!
There was nothing in my root feeling that came close to validating this explanation. What about semblances at the window? What about dungeon stairs? They couldn’t be reduced to a mere maxim. What about atom bombs? What about death itself? Where did they fit into the divorce? How could any of this be made normal, okay—ever?
But then who was I to argue with the master of symbols and dreams?
Meanwhile I withheld from him my real secrets (as I withheld from myself that I was withholding them): ungenerous emotions toward friends and family, erotic episodes during interplanetary daydreams, frustration with his solutions, irritation that he showed up with his wife at Grossinger’s for Christmas and joined Aunt Bunny and Uncle Paul for drinks by the fireplace. I didn’t want to be angered by that—it was a celebratory affair merging my two most important worlds—but I was, and I didn’t want to discuss it when he brought it up, wondering if it bothered me seeing him there. “No,” I replied cheerfully, “I wasn’t upset.” But I had not liked seeing him a regular man in conversation with adults. I did not want him to have an ordinary-looking wife. I did not appreciate his putting the Hotel’s largesse ahead of me, taking advantage of his position as my doctor. I didn’t tell him any of this because I thought it was ungenerous and petty of me. I didn’t want to be a run-of-the-mill Towers-family grouch.
We each missed the crux of my case. I was portraying only a part of Richard and in a way that was comfortable—self-flattering. Having made myself Dr. Fabian’s star pupil, I could not abandon the aggrandized role or my gallant martyrdom. He went along with the charade; yet he was marking time, probably waiting for me to mature and provide a hook or gem he could recognize.
I never told him that while I was free-associating specks in my ice cream, I was lying. My real first connection was that he was trying to poison me with the vanilla cup. Like an evil magician, he had been saving a black powder for years. He had sprinkled it in the ice cream, made it look undisturbed, then fit the top back on as if it had not been tampered with. That’s why the specks in the creamy white changed context in his presence, intimating something that vanilla never had before. I knew that the fear was irrational, that I wasn’t really afraid, but I was unable to stop scaring myself. Once I had dug in with my spoon, I found it impossible to remember whether the surface had been perfectly smooth or ruffled.
I couldn’t tell him any of that, yet it was exactly what he needed to know and what I needed him to know. I never considered confessing. His job was to make me a hero, his protégé, not a suspicious, ungrateful wretch. So we ended up with how babies are made instead of my fury at him or guilt for that anger, for suspecting such a turncoat deed from my benefactor and friend. We were staring at an obsessive-compulsive loop and missed it.
It never occurred to me that I would rather hold onto my secrets and fantasies than shatter their reverie. Nor did I let myself suspect, while I led him on a merry chase all those years, that Dr. Fabian himself was baffled by the increasing intricacy of my associations. I had figured out his game pretty well by then and perfected my resistance. While I dutifully provided ever more complex and bizarre material—after all, I was a reader of both Freud and the Hardy Boys—he kept searching for some classic etiology, finally settling on the divorce, out of either frustration or desperation.
I didn’t think to look out for him; I figured he was smart enough to look out for himself.
It never occurred to him that to tell a child, “You are afraid that something terrible is going to happen to you” is tantamount to saying something terrible is going to happen to you—that to make a pathological mother a piñata of clues, an oracle needing deciphering, was to inflate and empower her above mortal ken, the last thing his young charge needed. And to produce a vanilla ice-cream cup out of the blue was to suggest seduction, an inappropriate adult interest.
A better strategy would have been to produce gloves and a ball and propose having a catch in the neighborhood park. The unfraught camaraderie of a toss, acknowledging my baseball skills while setting us at a neutral distance, would have been ideal and more beneficial than our psychoanalytic burlesque—except that’s what we did, the best part of it. His sheer presence across the table, the origami boats and balls, his authentic interest in my life, his unconditional love for me were the therapeutic equivalent of having a weekly catch with Gil McDougald. It was more salutary than all his symbols and interpretations put together.
The ice-cream cup was a mistake only in that he lost track of where we were: my fear of poisons, my need to know where everything came from, his own unconscious ambivalences, about his feelings for a child, about crossing a professional line with a treat. He couldn’t help but serve all that with the vanilla, so I got it unconsciously too. Together we projected enough onto that cup to convert its specks from purity to danger. The ice cream became like the Cropsey’s orange at Chipinaw. Billy Cabot tricked me into eating it by pulling it from a bag and pretending it was a different one, before claiming that he picked it from the woods. Dr. Fabian wasn’t pretending, but he didn’t realize how horrible it was to think I ate the Cropey’s fruit, how long it stayed with me even though I didn’t believe that the cut-up maniac was real.
I was afraid of something terrible, and it had already happened, but it wasn’t my parents’ divorce. It was more like starry night or cavemen contemplating snow and wind with no hope of obviation or succor, without knowledge of what it was or who they were. Pulsations of panic evoked the Crusades, the Nazi death camps—an irreparable breach between fantasy and reality, a sphinx without gods or language.
Sometimes the haunting in me softened into sadness, a sense of being lost and forlorn (like Heidi’s grandfather searching frantically for her through wintry villages). It was more than a sadness. It was a shadowing of limitless depth, of layers parting to reveal other layers themselves parting like the leaves of maples in a breeze, like the rich, intoxicating solitude of autumn. In this form sadness was not only not sorrow; it was paradoxically the most joyful thing I knew. Not joyful like Grossinger’s but joyful like absurd reparation, like abject terror suddenly and inexplicably turning into bliss. I never understood the seesaw between those two halves of me: was I fortune’s most irrepressibly charmed kid who got to go to Grossinger’s and play with Boy or the world’s loneliest, most doomed pariah, the devil incarnate, sentenced to perdition forever? How could I be both? It was like “Did the Yankees win or lose?” but to the zillionth power.
The songs of the play Finian’s Rainbow (as performed by the older kids at Chipinaw) bore shards of the elusive dichotomy. I tried singing but couldn’t keep a tune. Upon request (and with a little help from me on the lyrics) Bridey reproduced them in her brogue: “How are things in Glocca Morra … / Does that leapin’ brook still…. ” Words and melody put their spell over me; the world itself seemed to drop a chord into slow motion and swim by in solemn, stately fashion. Yes, it was sad and fearful, but it was beautiful—shockingly, unprecedentedly beautiful. Then she sang, “Look, look, look to the rainbow…. ” I had no words to match it, but I leaned into the song like a sunflower into sun.
Jonny and I would run along the Nevele solarium, building little piles of snow on the railings in an effort to thaw some of the winter away in March while Debby splattered in her red rubber boots among puddles at our feet. Mommy sat on a lawn chair, her eyes closed, a silver reflector about her neck capturing the nearest star. Clump after clump of puffy cold was placed on rusty ledges as Jon and I called to each other to check the progress of the melting at either end. This industriousness would arouse a sense of the profoundest well-being in me. I’d be thinking about where I was in my latest science-fiction book and how later I’d lie toasty by the radiator and read it—then we’d eat dinner; afterwards, we’d have a plate of chocolate horseshoe cookies … and suddenly the song would seep through my existence: “Follow it over the hi-ill and stream…. ” I twisted the vowels in “follow” and “hill” and “stream” until they were barely English in the back of my mouth. There was a tenuous point, before they became garble, at which they held the whole mystery, the fairy tale, Bridey’s Ireland.
It was a book I read, maybe; a dream I had; or it was something else entirely, vast and incomprehensible. All the time, this mood dogged me, conveying feints and masks—and also that strangely immense joy (“… so I ask each weeping willow, / and each brook along the way …”). Jon and I would buy candy bars and comics at Ivy’s Store, go pinball bowling, and then sit in the lobby engrossed in Almond Joy and Porky Pig while languid crowds swept past. Smell, color, and mood combined in a wonder and delight that we existed at all. Gradually the mood would fade, or it might call to me from the faint center of a dream. Suddenly I was more than the recipient of a make-believe saucer, I was ward and guardian of the universe itself!
Its nether side was blind terror. The less there was to explain it, the more powerful its claim. It happened one night, as I came into the dining room for supper. I just looked at everyone seated there at the table—Mommy, Daddy, Jonny, Debby. Bridey was serving halved grapefruits for a starter. I adored sectioned grapefruits with a light coating of sugar, but the ambient shade of the walls was too pale. I thought, “This is it, forever—no!” I couldn’t relent to it, so I ran into my bedroom, hurled myself onto its blankets, and clutched them tight enough in my fingers and palms to make a hole in reality if such was possible. A beam of black light shot through my forehead—an apparition far graver yet more aware of who I was.
I could tell later, from their judging looks, they thought it was that I’d rather be at Grossinger’s, but it was more a feeling of having come into the wrong century, the wrong existence altogether.
7
CAMARADERIE
Across the landscape of our shared childhood my brother and I commanded a repertoire of games, concurrently chummy and cutthroat. The two of us were trapped inescapably in combat and collaboration. That our relationship was a competition was taken for granted, for we were born onto opposite teams—dogged opponents from the get-go like the Union and Confederacy. Our battles activated grudges from just beneath the surface, as we fought with tokens and cards, with rubber bands and words, and in currying parental favor.
Neither Jon nor I understood how our parents played us off against each other or used our enmity to defeat Grossinger’s and get their long-sought revenge. Ironically it wasn’t Bob who most perfunctorily scapegoated me, it was Martha. He was a dupe for her exotic legends and paranoid fantasies, and all too easily goaded. He respected her ferocity and intelligence, plus he didn’t want to be left behind by a woman on the march. In their gaze Jon and I could never exhibit too much affinity. If we did, they would find a way to spur us to combat like prize roosters. So, my brother and I had to find each other in secret, unacknowledged ways.
Our fraternization was imbedded in the diplomacy needed to conduct an open-ended clash. We would not have carried out such a ritual if we hadn’t hated each other, but likewise we could not have carried it out unless we were in simpatico. We had to concur on ethics and rules. The statutes of war, while not always obvious, invariably became so without undue dispute. Yet our surface rage blinded us to how we shared a mindset and an agenda—how we read the terms of engagement identically.
Much of our childhood was spent deciding in which competition to engage next and then enacting the chosen match, for there were long hours to fill. We would go from board and card games to baseball derivatives and other improvised contests of skill, strategy, and luck.
After setting up cowboys and Indians along the end of the hall, we aimed a marble back and forth, trying to knock over each other’s plastic figures. A perfect shot might ricochet and topple two or more of them. As the field became emptier of targets, hits became more difficult. We rolled back and forth, targeting the last standing men, often chasing the errant pellet down the hall and around the corner. Sometimes we included farm animals and knights and gave extra points for getting the marble up the ramp into the castle.
In another contest we set trash cans at opposite walls and tried to bounce a Spaldeen into it, either directly (for one point) or off the wall and back in (for two points) or off the wall and upon a second bounce (for three points). We played a related game on the sidewalk with a Spaldeen and a dime; only there we stood farther apart and tried to hit and spin up the coin on a fly.
A plop in a cylinder, the spin and clink of a dime, the recoil of a falling horse into two upright figures brought an ineffable jubilation every time.
Among our regular games were Chutes and Ladders, Quizkids, and Uncle Wig
gily’s rainbow maze, the boards as intimate to us as our own lives. A meandering numbered path led from Wiggily’s ramshackle bungalow in the lower lefthand corner—the rheumatoid rabbit setting out with cane and bag—to Dr. Possum sticking his snouty head out the stone house with its patchwork gray chimney at square 151 (upper right). In between lay the Skillery-Scallery Alligator with open jaws, the dreaded Rabbit Hole under the rotted trunk and ferns (back to square 13), the Wibble Wobble Pond (which was either good or bad depending on how far before or after square 60 you had gotten when you drew its yellow card), and the Bad Pipsisewah and Fox Den (where a player lost turns).
We played in order to reexperience the board’s radiant landscape and to renew our eternal rivalry. The cards, both white and colored, were familiar, but their sequences made them novel, disclosing unforeseeable outcomes—and those were infinite. Since our personal battle was never resolved, each new match presented a fresh opportunity to query fate.
I remember the excitement at drawing a 10 or 15, the sinking sensation when Jonny got one, the pleasure when he was sent back to the Bushytail Squirrel Tree after he was almost to Dr. Possum’s. No amount of repetition diminished the novelty of those moments. It was always a delight to see Jonny slide down the major chute at 87 all the way back to 24—or land on Skeezicks’ mouth. That never lost its unique thrill.
The boldly black-scripted cards of Sorry! with their numerical scriptures occupied another domain of our minds, as we raced to get four pawns of our color (red, yellow, green, or blue) around a track of periodically slide-enhanced squares. The plastic round-based, beadlet-topped tokens were clean and evocative—primary hues. Ones and twos released pawns into activity. Twelves conferred leaps forward, but an opportune four (backwards only) could dispose of the whole circuit around the board and put a token on the edge of the Safety Zone, an inopportune four set you back as well as waste a draw. Sevens were divisible in any combination between two pieces. Elevens allowed changing places with an opponent, a potential double whammy. A ten could be played as one-backwards in a gamble that required a quick second ten (or a four) to save a loss of the move and a longer journey around the board anyway.