New Moon

by Richard Grossinger

  I honor Mr. Hilowitz most for the day I had a panic. I was setting up a Sorry! game with Jon. As I stared at the yellow and red tokens at Start, I felt the disease. “I have it! I have it!” I screamed. Ice formed along my spine and neck and seeped into my chest. I was too wobbly to stand. My mother tucked me into bed, filled my nose with bitter drops, and smeared Vick’s Vaporub over my chest. An hour later my tutor arrived.

  I lay there, staring at the window, ashamed to be so revealed, trying to keep grim thoughts at bay. It was obvious I would do no work tonight. But he sat on the edge of the covers and told stories for the whole two hours, creating voices for historical figures as he went—Christopher Columbus, John Cabot, Roanoke and the mystery of Virginia Dare, Marquette and Joliet along the Mississippi, the French and Indian War, the Spaniards’ unsuccessful search for gold. He lured me back into the world of things and made existence normal again.

  That was my last full-fledged panic for almost ten years.

  The admissions interviews were intimidating and I clammed up, answering only as I was asked. At Horace Mann the teacher read from a list of questions that included: “What are your hobbies?” None came to mind.

  “Then what do you do in your spare time?”

  “Watch TV, listen to ballgames.”

  “Couldn’t you at least have told him you have a scrapbook on Mars?” my mother asked in the cab home.

  “I forgot.” It would have been a gold-star answer, but I didn’t begin to know how to distinguish my virtues from my vices.

  I failed the exam for Riverdale but got into Horace Mann. Phil was unimpressed. “That’s mostly for Jews and colored kids,” he said, “and even worse, it’s only boys. You won’t find Nancy Drew or Annie Welch there.”

  We all considered blonde tomboy Annie the cutest girl in Mrs. Lewis’ class.

  “I’m glad I’m not going,” he finally scoffed.

  I stopped talking to Phil after that. In fact, I interacted with him only one more time in childhood. During the fall of our first year at our new schools he called me to procure three out-of-print Tom Quest books I had bought at a used bookstore near Grossinger’s; he couldn’t find them anywhere and wanted to complete his set. I had stopped collecting the series by then, so we met on the east side of Park Avenue halfway between our 1235 and 1175 awnings where I sold him the copies. We didn’t even bother to catch up on each other’s lives at the new schools.

  All that time I was doing something different with the sinister signpost and hooded hawk. Now I was done with the mystery story forever. In fact, I was done with Richard Towers.

  I didn’t buy The Clue in the Embers, the Hardy Boys volume that appeared my last month of sixth grade. Because I never read the real version, the title came to stand for all emergent signs and mysteries. I had found the melted coins, opened the secret panel, learned the identity of the figure in hiding. The “lost tunnel,” “hidden harbor,” “green flame,” “whispering box,” et al., each had settled into latency, but they were indispensable, for they gave shape to my inner life and would appear over the years in other guises. “The clue in the embers,” though, remained my ultimate sphinx—beyond Fabian, beyond Freud. Unread, it couldn’t be known, so it made all other knowledge possible.

  Near the end of sixth grade I felt wild and unbounded. I wanted to bust out of the boy whose name I was surrendering for good.

  I had been collecting a cumulative set of Yankee cards but was missing three rare ones. A kid showed up on my next-to-last day of Bill-Dave with the coveted trio but would flip only if I put my precious Yankees at stake. There would never be another chance to acquire them, so I agreed to match his cards with prized ones of my own. He landed three tails and cheered aloud, pumping his fist. My heart in my throat, I flipped a second, then a third tail!

  But something else was happening, exploding from a place unknown into something I adored, had always adored but couldn’t get at. I was somehow being absolved. Dr. Fabian hadn’t found the link, but there had only been symbols to work with, symbols to lead the way. Now there were only actions—life itself.

  The next day I brought my cherished collection of cartoon, Flash Gordon, and other non-baseball cards to school and tossed them in the air, free for all takers. They blew about the P.S. 6 yard, causing a commotion.

  “The kid’s a madman!”

  “Totally nutso!”

  I loved it.

  And it was spring and cherry blossoms in Central Park, and something still bigger, bigger than even that, was called for. On the last day of group I brought my box of baseball cards and dispersed them too, an unexplained trail through the Park with the entirety of Bill-Dave following and fighting for possession a few hundred yards behind me as I ducked in and out of bushes—an anonymous Robin Hood—saving my Yankees for last, and finally at a kid’s request, a gag he didn’t expect me to take seriously, dropping those too, picture after picture, just days after winning the final three, even my years of every hard-earned card of Gil McDougald. I had no idea why. I had planned to keep those talismans forever. I only knew that I watched gleefully from a million miles away. “It’s Towers again,” they shouted, for the pictures gave away the identity of a person who no longer existed.

  I was free.

  One afternoon Mrs. Lewis asked me to stay after school for a conference. As I approached her desk, she congratulated me on my improved work and admission to Horace Mann. “You’re going to have to work even harder there. I want to get you off to a good start, so try to be more alert in class.” Then she extolled my new last name, which had been added to her records. “You must be related to Jennie Grossinger.”

  I nodded.

  “What a marvelous woman. She does so much for charity.”

  When Mrs. Lewis taught us about apples a few weeks later, she asked for extra-credit papers on one or another variety, so I raised the ante by writing on all three of them: the pippin, the winesap, and the MacIntosh, the separate colors and tastes of which still have a sort of runic depth for me—they mark the moment of transition.

  In the last weeks of school a few boys and girls began to go out with each other. A kid named Jimmy McCracken gave a studded dog collar to Annie Welch. She wore it around her calf above her ankle. That Annie Welch had travelled with me to other worlds was something I would tell no one, not even Dr. Fabian, as much as he might have wanted to know. Though Phil had proclaimed his intention to find a girlfriend like her, it was mainly boasting. He wasn’t any more ready than me.

  Then one night I dreamed that I had been hoodwinked in my pajamas, the very sheets and blankets still wrapped around me, back to the classroom. Only the girls were there, and three of them took my clothes off. They moved in a circle about me, silently, in a dance of animals. The room was thick with perfume and flowers.

  And then it became … walking in a forest, emerald moss beneath my feet. Long, light vines hung from the branches, exuding musty dew. I could actually feel their moisture and smell them. This dream was real!

  I came to a log shack—the true one, the prototype of the place that Joey, Andy, and I had built on another planet.

  Annie Welch was sitting there with two other girls. It was as though she was waiting for me. “I’m not Jimmy,” I tried to warn her, but she didn’t seem to care. She stood and approached me, set her hands on my shoulders and sat me down on a rock. Then she put a blindfold on me. One by one they kissed me on the face. I felt their lips in intoxicating sequence. Girls, that’s what they were! They could as easily have been a circle of wolves.

  I began spinning. Then the whole world around me was tumbling. I awoke in great joy with my penis hard. I lay in bed in a kind of ecstasy. I did not understand what was happening to me, and yet I had experienced such a complicated texture once before, in Westport when I was playing in the attic and the same hypnotic waves came over me from the aroma of an old leathery trunk.

  My dream now bore the resolution of this childhood experience, not so much the intimation of sexua
lity as the power of being enfolded within a sensuous and opulent space. It was not just an image or landscape; it was everything I was before Richard Towers and everything I would be after.

  Against that sensation my outer-space daydreams were faded postcards. It was one thing to fantasize settling on other worlds and another actually to be there.

  The memory of that dream gave me solace for years—the fact that someone kissed me, the richness of the green, the scented moisture, the way I merged with everything as it spun instead of becoming dizzy and separate, how the throbbing filled me from inside out.

  I couldn’t believe this had been there all along and neither I nor Dr. Fabian had noticed it. I was that forest. Its familiarity was the sweet caverns of my own being. I didn’t know it yet, but I had discovered that I was intact, that my body and spirit could still be recovered whole.

  When I fell back asleep, though, I found myself in the vacant classroom at night. I ran down the hallway in fear of what might come out of such an emptiness, ran all the way to the auditorium where—in pitch black, just what I feared—a rude billowing voice arose from behind the stage and roared through the room like a beast. I turned and fled out the door. I raced for blocks, but the sound pursued me, persistent against the sky.

  PART TWO

  THE KID FROM GROSSINGER’S

  1956–1960

  1

  HORACE MANN

  The summer of ’56 I went, as usual, to Chipinaw, this time as a prep-school-student-to-be. We were expected to have read at least four books of our choice from a Horace Mann assigned list, so I arrived with instructions from my mother that I be given time off for the task, the precise exemption I had long sought. Taking advantage, I packed not only the required David Copperfield but two other Dickens novels, Martin Chuzzlewit and Our Mutual Friend, and bought the complete Sherlock Holmes rather than the recommended Casebook.

  I lived that summer in fog along the Thames, unravelling John Rokesmith’s multiple identities and accompanying Martin Chuzzlewit from America to England. Whole nineteenth-century realms passed through me as I lay in the grass, beyond the stridency of games.

  Bunk 14’s regular counselor, Bernstein, had to leave for an undisclosed emergency mid-August—or maybe it was that we ran him ragged. He was a legendary disciplinarian who had sought the glory of whipping us into shape. But Bernstein was no match for our chutzpah, wits, and arrays of water traps and disappearing and reappearing objects. We left him apoplectic.

  An older guy was hired from off campus and put in charge of Bunk 14. Rumor was that he was an escaped convict and they had found him hitchhiking. Probably not, but it fit his m.o. He carried a mean-looking knife, drank straight from a bottle of hard liquor, and cursed us with four-letter words. He didn’t care about our keeping things neat—a tip-off that he was not Chipinaw stock—though he liked to order us around like slaves. He raided our secret food caches and, at meals, ate many of our portions too. He also invited kids to reach in his pocket while he lounged on his bed and feel a special treat he had there if anyone was hungry.

  Nothing close to this redneck had ever happened at Chipinaw. In retrospect, I can’t imagine how the anally fastidious management slipped up or recall why we didn’t report the dude’s malfeasances: I mean, a weapon, alcohol, pedophilia. I guess we thought we had lost all credibility by then.

  At breakfast one morning after our usual allotment (when French toast was on the menu) of eight pieces was deposited on the table, Ralph grabbed the platter and, in a deft scoop of his fork, stabbed four, leaving the rest for us to divide. I didn’t care much for Chipinaw French toast—and I had stayed mostly out of Ralph’s way—but this was an over-the-top psycho and I was incensed that he should have been put in charge of us. When the platter reached me, there was one piece left and one more person to go after me. I handed it back to Ralph and said, “Here. Maybe you didn’t get enough.” There was a hush as he surveyed me with wild eyes.

  “Stand up!” he screamed. That was the supreme embarrassment in the Chipinaw dining room—public reprimand. I sat there. “Stand up!” He rose and pointed at me. The cavernous room had turned silent. Jay and Barry were staring in horror.

  “Stand. Up!”

  I complied more in fury than obedience and, with a quick swat of my hand, turned over the pot of hot coffee on him. He let out a howl and dove across the table at me. Three other counselors wrestled him to the ground. “I’m going to kill him,” he screamed. “The little bastard, I’m going to kill him.”

  Despite the incident they left him in our bunk. I got only sporadic sleep after that, waking in starts, staring across the murk at his quiescent hulk, wondering if he was asleep or just pretending, and where the knife was (if not tucked under the covers with him). But I made it through the final week to the banquet alive (in some alternate reality I was murdered and Chipinaw was front-page headlines). All that last day we packed our clothes in trunks. I felt so much frenzied energy I could barely contain it: I didn’t have to sleep there another night—our beds were stripped, our cubbies bare. Deliverance!

  Near the end of the after-dinner awards ceremony, cars arrived to collect us: me, Jay, Siggy, Jay’s cousins from the girls’ camp, and Barry. No imagined escape by flying saucer was more thrilling or exotic. We were lights moving along back roads toward the Emerald City. Everything was charged, intricate, weird—billboards gateways to welcoming universes.

  I had dreams of Horace Mann before I went there. Hiking up marble steps, I passed between pillars fronting a Greek temple. As I entered, it turned into a large industrial building. Once inside, I could find no classrooms, only hallways through which crowds of people rushed. I saw no kids either, just preoccupied adults carrying papers and books.

  My mother took me to Saks Fifth Avenue and had me fitted for an entire wardrobe of sports jackets, ties, slacks, and shoes. As at Chipinaw accouterings, I was only an incidental mannequin to the deliberations of a woman and a salesman, as though they were deciding how some abstract child might look if he were properly attired. I could barely imagine attending a boys’ academy where jackets and ties were required and the teachers had to be addressed as “Sir,” so I felt like an impostor in these expensive duds.

  On the evening before the first day of Horace Mann my mother and Bob marked the occasion by taking me out to dinner at Tavern on the Green in Central Park. He spoke with his familiar adman flamboyance: “I hope you appreciate where you’re going. This is your chance to join the archons of our society.”

  “I don’t think he realizes how much work it will be,” my mother inserted.

  I was silent; I already feared the worst. “This is his last free night,” she continued, staring at me, “for six years!”

  “Don’t be ghoulish,” Bob chided.

  Lying in bed on the eve of a new life, I tried to grasp what was happening. Why had they even admitted a boy who barely made it through P.S. 6?

  Awakened by Bridey’s cheery 6 a.m. summons—“New school for the lad, rise and shine”—groggily I pulled pins and tissue paper out of a shirt and, before the bathroom mirror, knotted a red-and-brown striped tie. Trepidation warred with suspense, layers of sleepiness stirring remembrances in nausea-like aftertastes of breakfast: the dragons of Blueland, Flash Gordon at the Martian court. My mind kept supplying guises of stern, unsmiling masters like the signers of the Declaration.

  I glanced at the harlequin child in the mirror. Six years! I didn’t think I could do this for a week.

  By phoning the school my mother had gotten the names of two older students who lived in our neighborhood and arranged for them to teach me the route. I left Jon waiting for the Bill-Dave wagon at the 1235 canopy and proudly strode west across Park, then north across 96th Street to where a group of Horace Manners had gathered at the bus stop. My chaperones quickly identified themselves.

  Boarding, we dropped coins into the driver’s box, then found seats along the rear window. There they taught me a game played with serial numbers
on the transfers we had requested (but didn’t need). We raced each other to be the first to make our consecutive digits end up at ten by trying out sequences of addition, subtraction, division, multiplication, and squares until we landed on the decimal ten at the end (for instance, 71435 could hit the target as 7 squared minus 1 divided by 4 plus 3 minus 5). It would be months before we tired of this exercise (it now seems apropos that my first contact with Horace Mann was a cerebral math game). Meanwhile, Madison and Fifth flew by as we zipped into the Park through its tunnels to the less familiar West Side. After Central Park West came Columbus and Amsterdam, foreboding side streets before the years of gentrification. We disembarked next at commercial Broadway and plunged into the tenebrous IRT (Interborough Rapid Transit).

  Purchasing fifteen-cent tokens from the lady at the booth, we bombed through the turnstiles to catch a pausing train. In later weeks I would simply flash my student pass at the agent as I opened the gate.

  Barely beating the thud of metallic doors, we sat in contemplative silence as—stop by stop—the car filled with attendees of different schools, most of the further uptown arrivals having to stand. Then the train rattled out of the underworld onto stilts and wound above the northern city, emptying by portions onto streets in the 200s.

  Horace Mann shared the last station with Manhattan College: 242nd Street—all off—the train emptying in a bustle verging on pandemonium. From there we hiked four blocks up a hill to 246th. (Unaccompanied on my second day, I overrated the age of Horace Mann upperclassmen, joined the wrong crowd, and ended up at an edifice resembling the temple of my dream.)

  I was expected to report to Pforzheimer Hall, its sleek modern box hugging a slope below ivy-covered classrooms. Designated expressly for the Lower School, it was like an elongated space station with entry ports. We were its baptizers, which postponed the start of classes for a ceremonial ribbon-cutting. I was grateful for a few extra hours before any action was required other than getting my schedule from an alphabetical stack—no way to mess up yet. On the other hand, I had a full calendar card of classes in separate rooms—not one teacher for everything like at P.S. 6—and a new last name. This was getting serious!