I was reading not just for graded study now but catharsis, for I intuited in myself the same mystery that drove Baruth’s authors to eloquences of revelation. Freud’s symbolic universe loomed large, but it was a façade. A more abstruse reality seeped from every courtyard light, Indian-summer tree and rooftop water tower, from flocks of birds crossing the last luminations of urban twilight. There was a realm of untapped wonderment, as big as the sky, and it conjured me through my turbulence and gloom.
I spent hours in the Museum of Natural History, passing from mural to mural, gazing at animals in dioramas of the Rockies … Africa … Alaska … the South American forest, the pygmy drawing his bow by a broken ostrich egg. Their stark, magnificent specificity reflected my mood. The Siberian tiger in his golden striped flesh against violet-dimmed winter was a force, though stuffed and mounted in artificial scenery, a force I acknowledged but could not name. His majesty—and that of mountain sheep and antelopes and snow leopard—held the key to the trance I was in.
“Twas brillig, and the slithy toves” said it all by saying nothing. Alice in Nonsense-land, the world did “gyre and gimble in the wabe.” My vernacular Top Twenty was full of it’s inscrutable rapture. It was the Platters, “tears I cannot hide,” Ricky Nelson, “and the only price you pay,” Little Anthony, “I’d gladly take you back / and tempt the hands of fate.” What else was there but those hands of fate, that stranger across a crowded room? “Who can explain it, who can tell you why? / Fools give you reasons, wise men never try.”
I opened most weekends with a Friday night concert before our parents got home. Alone with my Magnavox I put on one 45 after another and lay there suffused in the worlds of feeling they invoked. It was not so much their lyrics—although those uncannily paralleled my sentiments. No, it was that each tune-word combination was idiomatic and complete, a trace of something ineffable.
My song for those months was Cathy Carr’s “First Anniversary.” Her happy/sad tomboy voice spoke for Joan Snyder and my unlived self:
Look at you. Look at me.
See the way we glow
You’d believe that we just met
One week a-go-o-o-o.
Though such sweet, perky simplicity seemed beyond me, it was everything I worshipped and wanted to be, wanted to find in the world. I would sprawl on the floor against my bed, in touch with a reverence, an incipient joy that, though not as familiar to me as languor or fear, seemed equally to lie at my core. It was, as Bobby Darin proposed, “Every night I hope and pray”—a prayer—and: “Dream lover, until then, / I’ll go to sleep and dream again…. ”
Then those Photo Fair, gee-whiz-dreaming Everly Brothers; Paul Anka summoning three syllables of a teen goddess “Di-an-a”; Neil Sedaka, “Happy Birthday, Sweet Sixteen” (“It’s just that you’ve grown up / before my very eyes); Dion & the Belmonts: “Now if you want to make me cry, / that won’t be so hard to do. But the promise always, from Wordsworth to “Dover Beach” to Thornton Wilder: “ … the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning”; so Dion on cue: “And if you should say goodbye / I’ll still go on loving you….”
How could lyrics be any more exquisite, more perfect? I melted my heart and voice into theirs, participating in a spontaneous force that supported and carried me along, as if melody were rich enough to hold Creation. Even the uncued silences between words resonated with undisclosed meanings.
“Each night I ask, the stars up above …”—my echo drawling out the “s” and “r” and “v” even more than Dion, in total agreement: that it was sad but that it was also wonderful … that someday I would get to the bottom of this.
There was one song in which the deceptively simple words had no discernible connection to their power over for me:
I’ve a-laid around / and played around / this old town too long,
Summer’s almost gone, / winter’s comin’ on.
Which winter? What town?
I saw a village out west. I heard the distant echo of “Winter Wonderland,” my mother in her black velvet overcoat, walking on new-fallen snow of Central Park in a landscape that seemed before even Lenape longhouses and canoes, a panorama of childhood in a divining jar through whose opacity crystals fell.
But it was more than that. Just the word “winter” was evocative—the feeling of cold flakes on my skin, sleigh rides with Daddy, steering around the Park’s titanic outcroppings, colored lights street after street.
Dr. Friend would review the song with me by stanza:
Papa writes to Johnny, / but Johnny can’t come home. / Johnny can’t come home, / no Johnny can’t come home.
“It’s your brother, of course,” he noted cursorily, an obvious association for which I took his word.
Papa writes to Johnny, / but Johnny can’t come home. / ’Cause he’s been on the chain gang too long.
Yes, Jonny it must be. So obvious. Yet it didn’t ring true. Right name, wrong tone. The “Johnny” in the song was some sort of bandit hero. He was an offshoot of “Oh, my papa,” Eddie Fisher singing his requiem, “To me he was so wonderful …,” the sword of cancer shadowing those very words … “another place/another time” (Bridey Murphy). Everything so convoluted, so inextricable!
“What about the chain gang, Richard? Do you picture your family in New York as a prison in which your brother is trapped? Your own father can call you home but not your brother who can’t leave his family.”
Maybe. Then, does that mean I feel sorry for Jon? Is there some other Jonny hidden inside my brother who would be my friend in better circumstances? Are we westerly bound bandits in another place, another time? Does the song call for him from behind its yearnful drone and jaunty cowboy voice?
Not enough! Still not enough! This was Planet Mars big, big as the ocean sending waves across itself, cosmic-ray big, big as all the cities on all the stars in the universe. Or, maybe it was just the prophecy of escape, that someday I was going to walk out of this place into my destiny. A dark November day bearing the amulet of my birth sign….
And I feel like I gotta travel on.
Soon after getting my Minolta, I became friends with the president of the Horace Mann camera club. His name was Billy; he was short with a big owl-like face, and I liked him because he was kind and well-spoken as we ranged over topics on our subway route home. He didn’t talk about sports or girls and parties—a relief. As we sat in facing seats, I blabbed on about my mother and stepfather, the family at Grossinger’s, the scene at the Hotel.
The first time we got together outside of school or the IRT was a Saturday gathering of the camera club—a trek through Greenwich Village, each of us stocked with recycled canisters of bulk film from 35-millimeter rolls—less than a penny a shot. We loaded them ourselves inside black boxes we all owned—a giant reel in one compartment, a spool, tin capsule, and clip-top assembled in a tiny adjoining one after attaching the exposed leader with scotch tape to the spindle and rotating the crank.
Moving as a group, we photographed derelicts, kids at play, and generic urban landscapes, occasionally isolating car tail-lights into funny faces, racing to be the first to find and frame a qualifying vehicle. Afterwards Billy and I went to his apartment where his stepfather orchestrated a wide-ranging dinner debate on world events.
I couldn’t imagine reciprocating at my apartment, so I came up with a more audacious plan: I asked Aunt Bunny if I could invite Billy to Grossinger’s.
“Of course. I think you’re old enough to have a guest along.” While conceding that my father would probably object, she brushed it off, “He’d just be scared that Billy would trip over a rock and his parents would sue us—that’s all.”
My promise such a thing wouldn’t happen caused her to laugh out loud.
Ray picked me up after school on the Friday of spring vacation and headed downtown to collect my stepmother at her psychiatrist. As she emerged from the canopy I ran from the car to greet her. She was whistling and didn’t stop, nodding hello in lieu of words. She asked if
I could guess why. I couldn’t, so she told me: Dr. Corman was leaving the building at the same moment, and she was letting him know I was her son too, a version of “Yessir, that’s my baby.”
I felt an unexpected surge of tears.
Then she remembered about Billy and began to list the exciting things we could do together. Right then and there I knew I had made a mistake.
I had five days of breathing room before my friend’s arrival, so I made the most of them, throwing myself into an old-fashioned Grossinger’s spree. The first morning in the country Michael, Jimmy, and I took sleds to the golf course and raced one another down hills. We were daredevil clowns, flying over bumps and tumbling into drifts. Then, noisy enough to be hushed by Uncle Abe, we hit the dining room at the peak of lunch, hair covered with ice balls. After gobbling down potato pancakes and pineapple blintzes, we ordered all four desserts (cookies, lime sherbet, strawberry shortcake, and date-nut slices) and went back out for a snowball fight.
All day long I was the kid from Grossinger’s, the native son, carefree and reckless—I had heard the call of the wild. At night I reverted to the scion of Horace Mann, an equally sublime role.
“Richard’s doing his Egyptian hieroglyphs,” Michael announced. Aunt Bunny smiled and half-heartedly told him to get back to his own homework. But you couldn’t change the spots on the leopard or turn Grossinger’s into the Sorbonne. It was near impossible to disengage from the Hotel’s mood of dalliance and return to my lettered allotments. No one there paid more than lip service to schoolwork or grades. Toys, desserts, TV shows, and whims of recreation ruled. Michael and James at best raced through an abridged version of a spurned ritual. The mere solving of a page of math problems or translation of a Latin chapter—assignments on which I spent hours per night and entire weekends in New York—seemed as alien here as decoding a document from a Phoenician shipwreck.
I’d be in my hardcore study mode, bearing down, driven by monastic pride, as from the background came decibels of 77 Sunset Strip or What’s My Line?, the whole family watching, a rite I adored too, particularly our last call for milk shakes, cookies, and ice-cream sodas from the canteen. For that I took a break and crossed over.
Later in the week the air turned warm, and the snow melted. It was suddenly spring. Upon hearing that I was studying biology, Milty found an old microscope somewhere in his domain and presented it to me. The next morning I collected water from the lake; then Michael and I kneeled on the floor of his room, directing sunlight from the machine’s mirror through a slide. It illuminated paramecia and other tumbling creatures: a miraculous spectacle—a world inside a world, shut off and immune, invisible except for the curve of a tiny round glass.
Michael was amazed to see such beings, astonished that they looked like real animals, swimming about with a purpose. I told him that we were like Alice at the bottom of the rabbit hole after swallowing the EAT ME cake, too large to make ourselves known.
The next morning I brought the metal scope to a different pool, the golf-course water-hole. Kneeling on its edge, I used a dropper to fetch a bead of elixir, put it on a slide, and found an unexpected treasure: a bumper crop of one of the secondary phyla Mr. Moody had cursorily scooted over—dozens of whiskered rotifers whirling about and caroming off each other.
After dipping an empty honey jar and filling it with the pond’s broth, I carted my sample and the microscope around and demonstrated the animalcule circus, first to a flabbergasted Milty, then to an applauding Grandma Jennie, finally to Aunt Bunny and Michael and James. Cute rotifers collided and veered among the diatoms and plankton like a cartoon of tiny cats, unaware that they had been in a pond and were no longer there. “What a delightful discovery you have made,” Aunt Bunny declared. “And not a golfer would suspect it; he would only be concerned with his lost strokes.”
Before dinner I returned the unviewed remainder to their home.
That Friday the event I had set into motion came to its inescapable denouement. Ray pulled up at the house. I prayed for PG’s car to be empty. It wasn’t. My friend got out and stood in the road, yawning. I observed him from the upstairs window: a diffident, self-conscious boy I barely knew, in a suit jacket and tie with a beat-up suitcase. He didn’t belong here.
I wanted to run away, to never have been wiled by him or shared intimacies on the subway. I hated the part of myself that had been needy enough to befriend him. Michael grunted in slapstick, declaring, “Your friend looks like Iggy.” He didn’t, but this was no joke and I refused to meet his flippancy.
“Aren’t you going to show me the Hotel?” Billy asked excitedly as I led him upstairs. I had talked about it enough; now it was at hand. I managed a nod. As my mother liked to say, “You made your bed; now you can lie in it.”
For the next two days I took Billy on a tour of my alternate reality while trying to regain camaraderie. Yet habits and gestures of his that once attracted me to him now seemed pretentious and affected. As he stumbled around the rink, I pretended not to know him. Later that day I left him in a beginner’s group at the ski slope while I took the rope to the top and sped down past. What an asshole I was! But I couldn’t help myself. The next morning I avoided getting packed into a toboggan with him, squirrelling my way into a different group, leaving him to ride alone with a couple and their child.
Without the charisma I had projected onto him, Billy was a priggish adversary who resented my indifference and demanded courtesies I withheld. But he was also a decent kid who lost his way in the hullabaloo of Grossinger’s. He didn’t know how to act or what was expected of him. How could he? That was my job, his host, to make him comfortable enough to shine. Trouble was, I didn’t like him anymore. So I made things hard for him much in the way I learned to do with my brother Jon—sneakily and irreproachably. I lavished more attention on Michael—on Milty, Irv Jaffee, and Jack the waiter. This was my preserve—no intruders allowed, certainly not uncool chumps or jackasses. All along I maintained a supercilious, chatty front. He kept asking, “What’s wrong. Did I do something?”
“Nothing,” I snapped.
It seemed that, once upon a time, through an improbable act of fate, I had escaped the Towers household and been given an unwarranted dowry like Dickens’ Pip. I should have been grateful, forever humble, but I had been practicing anything but humility. Through the years of coming, as if self-effacingly, to my father’s preserve I had turned into a tyrant too. Even as I gallantly pretended to disavow Richie Rich, I played him to the hilt, the owner’s son. I enacted my mother’s false pride, exclusivity, and misanthropy, her condescension and cruelty toward others.
New York Richard was a shy, accommodating chap, modest and deferential, nose to the grindstone. He kept a low profile and turned the other cheek. Grossinger’s Richard was a careless, slaphappy miscreant, lacking, when the chips were down, even minimal decency. Handed everything, he extended and bestowed nothing. The two selves denied, even shunned each other. Together they had conspired to fool Dr. Fabian; now they kept their scheme from Dr. Friend.
I had told myself for years that Jonny was the bad guy in our household, a bully and punk; I was his hapless victim. Now I found myself just as much a bully, in fact more so. For I was not only treating a harmless friend worse than my brother ever treated me, I was proving that this behavior of mine didn’t need a valid excuse; it was in my character: I was an irascible trickster, Martha’s son through and through. Olivia de Havilland—as Catherine in The Heiress—spoke my lines when I spurned Billy exactly as she would have: “Yes, I can be very cruel. I have been taught by masters.”
I didn’t realize this as much as forebear its tawdry implications and unconscious guilt. I felt like a centipede exposed by its rock being turned over, scurrying to dig back into the dirt.
After three days Billy and I had run out of ruses. Our silence marked the demise of our friendship. But this time I was an undisputed jerk. I had been provoked by little more than embarrassment over a boy’s ugly suitcase and provinciali
sm.
Perhaps that’s why I nursed the story of Billy and me so long, drawing it out until even Dr. Friend was exasperated: it held an unpleasant truth which I could neither admit nor stop picking at. I couldn’t tolerate intimacy. I couldn’t permit my two identities, Horace Mann and Grossinger’s, to share a friend or, more precisely, have that friend watch me squirming between them while pretending it was business as usual. I couldn’t integrate my two selves: the docile, intellectual schoolboy and the slaphappy, arrogant prince regent. Each was the other’s worst nightmare.
“What are you really thinking?” Dr. Friend would ask tiredly, again and again. “You’re a human being, you have flaws, you don’t always behave well. Welcome to the club.”
He was right, but my split selves, even as they hid behind each other, refused to come clean, to become reconciled enough to answer.
The end of P.S. 6 for my brother marked our departure from Park Avenue. Debby was attending the private bilingual Lycée Français, so there was no longer any reason to hang on at the boundary of the Upper East Side school district. We could get more space for less money on the West Side.
Placards advertising “apartments available” on façades of stone buildings had been invisible mainstays of New York, background art in an illustrated Gotham. Now as I saw them with fresh eyes, I imagined life inside each unknown monolith with six or seven cryptic rooms to let: kitchen, living room, dining room, bedchambers. Every time we were given a key and shown around, it was like briefly being another family, filling those spaces with our meals and melodramas.
After a six-week search, my mother and Bob settled on an affordable unit in a huge twin-towered building on the Park at 90th, the Eldorado Towers; we became denizens of 8C, 300 Central Park West. Bare of furniture, the space was evocative, an uninterpreted dream. A small cubicle with its own bathroom adjoined the room deeded to Jon and me. It was pronounced my study in order to allow me to work at night after he went to bed.
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