The Lost Language of Cranes

by David Leavitt

“I wouldn’t know. I wasn’t born yet.”

  She laughed. “No, I guess you weren’t.”

  The elevator arrived, and Mrs. Lubin got off on the second floor. He continued to the twelfth. His parents’ apartment was at the end of a long mud-colored hall. Undoing the complicated series of locks, he went inside the apartment. His mother sat at her desk in the living room, bent over a long and messy manuscript, and, seeing him, she raised her head in the barest greeting. “Well, well, well,” she said, taking off her glasses. “It isn’t often we get a spontaneous visit from the likes of you.” She stood, offering him her cheek to kiss. She smelled dusty, like pencil shavings, and more faintly, of lavender-scented soap. “What’s the occasion?”

  “No occasion. I just had a free night and thought I’d drop by.”

  She helped him off with his coat. “That’s nice of you, Philip,” she said. “But unfortunately your father’s not here now. Tonight’s the night he has to address the parents. He’ll be in around ten. Anyway, I wasn’t planning anything for dinner. I don’t know what’s in the fridge—”

  “Don’t worry, Mom,” he said, following her into the kitchen, “I’ll order out some Chinese food or something. I was just thinking that I’d like to go through some of my old books, and I thought tonight might be a good night to do it.”

  “Yes. Tonight.” She seemed suddenly distracted.

  “Mom?” he said.

  “What? Oh, yes, tonight. Well, that sounds fine.” She began opening up containers of pink Tupperware and dumping their contents into saucepans. “We’ve got leftover Stroganoff you can finish,” she said. “And turkey Tetrazzini. You used to love that.”

  “Really, Mom, you don’t have to—”

  “But you’re doing me a favor. No one’s going to eat these leftovers if you don’t.”

  “Well—”

  “All right, then, it’s settled.” She stirred the contents of the saucepans with a wooden spoon while he sat at the kitchen table and read the paper. One of the models in a Bergdorf Goodman ad bore a strong resemblance to Eliot, he thought, and he almost mentioned the coincidence when he remembered that his mother knew nothing about Eliot, wouldn’t even recognize his name. He would have liked to have said to her, “Mom, I’m in love.” He would have liked to have told her that later in the week he was having dinner with Derek Moulthorp, that his lover was the adopted son of Derek Moulthorp, whose books she had copy-edited and loved so much she had brought them home for Philip to read. It was almost more than he could bear to keep from telling her. His mouth opened involuntarily, then closed again. He looked at the table. He had no more fear, as he had for years, that she would turn on him, reject him, deny he was her son. He was afraid only of the power he held to hurt her. And yet somehow the atmosphere of this cold night seemed too tender to bear such blows.

  He ate his dinner quietly while she sat across from him, rubbing the tip of a pencil eraser against her teeth, her half-glasses hanging low on her nose. Then he went into his room. They had not done much with it since he’d left. The shelves were still filled with the books of his childhood, like all the books in the apartment, haphazardly crammed on top of one another. Off of the shelf he pulled an old gray and pink book with a slightly torn dust jacket. It was titled Questa and Nebular. All Philip remembered of the book was that there was a rich child who spent most of his time in a giant playhouse so ambitious in its scale and so accurate in its reproduction of adult reality that it might as well have been a real house. He opened the book to re-acquaint himself with the story, and soon it came flooding back. Of course it was not a real house, and the child’s distracted parents worried that their son was “losing touch with reality.” Clio, the rich boy’s cousin (and the novel’s heroine), appreciated her cousin’s impulse to escape but didn’t have such options herself. Determined not to expect too much, she expected too little; that was what all of Moulthorp’s children were like.

  Like a child, Philip sat cross-legged on the floor. On the jacket cover of Questa and Nebular, three of Derek Moulthorp’s famous fat-cheeked emerald-eyed children—the little girl, Clio, and her two odd neighbors, Romaine and Godfrey, a.k.a. Questa and Nebular—stood in a room full of toy robots. Moulthorp had painted them in a style that reminded Philip of the Japanese cartoon shows he had watched after school as a child, Speed Racer and Gigantor and Kimba the White Lion. It thrilled him to think that he had once read this book merely for the pleasure of it, merely because he had enjoyed Moulthorp’s other books, and had not realized that someday he would fall in love with a man who had been raised in the benevolent atmosphere of the same mind, the same imagination that had generated these words, these pictures. And yet his nine-year-old self had sat here, lost in The Wish-Portal, and not known he was being offered a prophecy of his own life it would take him years to recognize. Eliot had always been there, in those books, on those shelves.

  Philip held the book in his hands now, away from his face, like one of those rare and ancient Bibles the mere touch of which is said to hold curative powers. He opened it, moved past the title page and the copyright page. There, majestic and grand, in bold, legible Jansen, was the Moulthorp canon:

  OTHER BOOKS BY DEREK MOULTHORP

  THAT YOU WILL ENJOY

  The Original Mr. Olliphant (1955)

  The Frozen Field (1957)

  The Wish-Portal (1962)

  Mr. Olliphant’s Orphanage (1964)

  Mr. Olliphant’s Orangery (1966)

  Questa (1968)

  The Radioactive Erector-Set (1970)

  So the career progressed. With the exception of the five-year gap that fell between The Frozen Field and The Wish-Portal—unquestionably Moulthorp’s greatest work—a new book had come out every two years with clockwork regularity, all the way up to Questa and Nebular, the last Philip had owned, and beyond: He knew there were five or six more that had been published since his childhood ended. Philip wondered about that five-year gap. Perhaps it simply proved that a work of genius takes longer to gestate than a work of mere competent brilliance. Perhaps a long writer’s block had occurred. And yet he could not help being conscious of the fact that the gap corresponded almost exactly with the death of Eliot’s parents and his subsequent adoption. It must have been an ordeal for two men, in the late fifties, to adopt a child, requiring, Philip imagined, a bravery and a self-assurance which could not have been easy for a gay man to come by. Had The Wish-Portal been born out of the crisis of those deaths? Certainly the novel exhibited a grand and generous pessimism, a cautious yet extensive knowledge of sorrow, but it hardly provided any facts that would enlighten Philip on the direction of real history. In The Wish-Portal, a boy named Alvin and his loud family take a trip in a Winnebago across country, stopping along the way at bizarre tourist attractions. They end up at “The Place Where Time Is Broken”—a house built on the line between two time zones where an old widow and her daughter have set up a makeshift Time Machine Museum. The surprise of the novel is that the Time Machine Museum hides a real “wish-portal,” a gateway to other worlds of which even the old women aren’t aware. Its wonderfully humane conclusion insists upon children’s need for dignity, even in the most undignified situations. Was it because of Eliot, Philip wondered now, that Derek Moulthorp was able to understand this? He could taste the question on his lips; could taste the answer, the knowledge, salty with danger, for he knew Eliot would not like it if he were to ask Derek questions about that part of his life. Eliot avoided talking about his real parents just as he refused to explain the source of his income, changing the subject whenever it came up; he kept no pictures of them, no mementoes. And Philip had learned that it was risky to nag him about it; Eliot’s silence on the question had a panicked edge he could feel.

  He turned another page of Questa and Nebular, and the dedication leapt at him, even though it had nothing to do with Eliot or anyone else he knew or had heard about: “For my nieces and nephews: Sambo, Sousou, Joanna, Alexander, and yes, you too, Margaret.” He had nev
er thought to look at the other dedications, and so, springing up from the floor, he began tearing the Derek Moulthorp titles from the shelves. He had to ransack the living room where his mother was watching television before he finally discovered Mr. Olliphant’s Orphanage tucked between a couple of tourist guides to Venice. The Radioactive Erector-Set had fallen behind some home repair manuals. Soon he had them all. Breathless, he arranged them chronologically in a pile on the floor of his room and began to read the dedications. The Original Mr. Olliphant had none that he could discover; The Frozen Field was dedicated, but unrevealingly: “To the memory of my parents and grandparents.” Then came The Wish-Portal: “To the memory of Julia and Alan Abrams.” That would, of course, be Eliot’s parents. And closing the book, Philip thought: They had names. They were real, and their names were Alan and Julia, and they died sometime in the fifties. Alan and Julia: the names conjured images in Philip’s mind: a talkative, sprightly young man, thin, with a balding pate and small round glasses; a pretty, dark-haired woman, older, dressed in old clothes. Why old clothes? Who could say if they looked like that? Two people were dead, their car smashed and smoldering, and perhaps a little boy, alive, in the back seat, screaming for his parents. Or was that merely Philip’s imagination? Was Eliot really in the car? Had it been a car? Philip didn’t know.

  He read on. Mr. Olliphant’s Orphanage was dedicated, unmysteriously, “to G.” Mr. Olliphant’s Orangery even less mysteriously, “to G.B. with love.” Only two left. Warily he opened Questa and read, “Once again, for Geoffrey”—a sequence that was in and of itself something of a history. And now only one book, The Radioactive Erector-Set, remained that he possessed, the only one Philip hadn’t finished. It must be dedicated to Eliot. How could Derek Moulthorp have not dedicated at least one book to his beloved son, who would have been by that time thirteen years old?

  He opened the book and read the dedication: “For Eliot—if he wants it.” No more, just those words. Philip closed the book. Well, he thought, that’s what I was looking for. “If he wants it.” He had hoped for too much from a dedication, he supposed; enrichment, assurance, prophecy, ebullient sentences that would corroborate the myths of Eliot’s origins. “If he wants it”: Was that true ambivalence? Was it a joke? He read the words again and again, until they stopped making sense. They were private words. Their meaning could not be unlocked without a special key. They closed Philip out. And after all, why shouldn’t they? Dedications were not for readers; they were for the author’s friends and family, his special inner sanctum, his loved ones. How dull his own life suddenly seemed in comparison to Eliot’s, his lonely childhood which seemed to him now to have taken place entirely on stretches of blacktop, on cold afternoons when the hands ache, when children skid on ice and fall flat on their faces. Whereas Eliot, he was sure, had grown up very differently, in a house of clever jokes and made-up songs, a house where stories were told and pictures drawn, and doors to pantries were portals to lands where princesses rode unicorns, and doughy creatures laughed on the banks of rivers—the very lands, in fact, that Philip was reading about on those rainy afternoons, escaped into through wardrobes or holes in fences: Narnia; Wonderland; Oz. Fountains casting cold sheets of bright water, rainbows, nights on boats counting the stars. He had tried to get there once, that afternoon in Central Park, when he threw himself, again and again, against the wall. He had hoped it would happen as it happened in The Silver Chair, where the fence falls open, and Eustace Scrubb and Jill Pole fall into Narnia, into heroism, and away from the indignity of their hated school. As Derek Moulthorp knew, children care more about dignity than most adults realize or remember. But Philip, no matter how hard he threw himself, got nowhere. Eliot, lucky Eliot; he was probably playing on the other side of the wall all along.

  He lay back on the floor, trying to imagine Eliot’s house. Perhaps it would be like the grand apartment in Tudor City that belonged to old Madame Duval, the French teacher at Harte. She had made a tea for her class there, and they had sat on velvet furniture amid shelves of old books while dust swirled like insects before their eyes. But Derek Moulthorp did not live in a high-rise; he lived in a house, a grand and glorious townhouse with a fireplace. Philip envisioned the fireplace as huge, vast, the size of a room, another wish-portal in a house full of wish-portals. He’d push his way through; the embers would gradually turn green, turn into soft green ferns.

  There was a knock on the door. “Philip?” Rose called. “Are you all right?”

  As usual, she did not wait for him to say, “Come in,” but swung open the door and walked in on him. He flew into the air so fast that the book he was reading leapt out of his hand, hitting a wall. Only after a few seconds did he realize that the worst nightmare of his adolescence was not coming true; that he had been caught in the act of nothing for which Rose might find him guilty; that he was sitting surrounded not by pornographic magazines, but by the books of his childhood, the most innocent books of all.

  “I was just looking through some of my old books,” he said, and although he spoke the truth, his voice was that of a liar.

  “I see that,” Rose said, and laughed. “Well, forgive me for acting like a mother, but I hope you’re planning to put those back when you’re done with them.”

  “Yes, Mom.”

  “Because even if you don’t, your father and I still live here—God willing—and we use this room and want it to look neat.”

  “Yes, Mom, of course.”

  “All right, then.” She looked doubtful. “Can I really count on you?”

  “Mom!”

  “All right, all right. I’ll leave you alone.” She backed away and closed the door, shaking her head, clearly grateful for the chance to behave like a mother again. Relieved, Philip sat back down on the floor. He knew, of course, that all the magazines were gone, long gone, thrown out ritualistically the day before he left for college. There really was nothing left here that might taint him, nothing she could hold over him.

  But still he looked around himself, trying to find something to hide.

  The summer Philip first read Derek Moulthorp’s novels was the one summer Rose and Owen took him on a real vacation. He was twelve years old, not yet pubescent, anxious about the strange new school he’d be attending in the fall. Every summer since their return from Rome their holiday had consisted of two weeks at the Jersey shore, at cousin Gabrielle’s house on Long Beach Island, where Philip, bored and lonely, spent most of his afternoons walking along the beach, bouncing a big red-and-white-striped beach ball. One day out of the two weeks, in response to extreme pleading from Philip, Rose and Owen took him to the amusements at Asbury Park, where he would ride the roller coaster and go through the Chamber of Horrors and on the Tilt-A-Whirl and the Trabant and the Lobster. There was a strange wistfulness about those afternoons, riding alone or with other single children (usually fat little girls in halter tops, gnawing taffy) in little cars designed to hold couples and encourage sexual intimacy. Owen and Rose followed him, tired and bored in the heat, shielding their eyes from the sun, while occasionally a barefoot child screamed, his soles singed by the blacktop. The rides made Owen sick and terrified Rose, who doubted she would ever recover from one in particular in which she was strapped upright to the inside of a thing which resembled a giant piepan and which turned on its side and twirled in the sky, its cargo of standing prisoners screaming. She lost her hat, and afterwards would only ride on the gentle twisting train that took them through Fairyland. Once or twice Philip’s friend Gerard joined them for a few days, and Rose and Owen were freed; the boys went alone to Asbury Park, while they sat reading in an air-conditioned restaurant, and the melancholy ritual excursion from ride to ride was suddenly enlivened for Philip. In Gerard’s company, he no longer had to wait for another single child to come along to share a claw with him on the whirling lobster. They rode together, and what he knew was centrifugal force pressed Gerard’s body hotly into Philip’s as he gasped for breath, feeling himself buried under the mas
s of Gerard. Gabrielle and Jack’s daughter Michelle, who was a year older than Philip, came along sometimes as well and brought her friends, who absorbed Philip into their easy suburban cliquishness, until the Benjamins arrived one summer to find that Michelle had grown breasts and done her hair like Farrah Fawcett, after which Philip, still a child at twelve, stayed in his room, frightened by the big hoarse-voiced boys who came round to admire her potent, threatening pubescence. Michelle looked twenty at thirteen, went to bars regularly, and laughed out loud when Owen and Rose asked her if she would like to accompany them to Asbury Park, as if a hundred years had passed since last summer. Alone again, Philip rode the Hurricane and the Tumbler, and worried about the sparse hairs that were growing under his arms. Fearful of his mother seeing them, he kept his shirt on until the last possible minute when going swimming, then jumped into the water, his arms glued to his sides.

  All that summer, back in the city, he was mopish. Rose blamed the weather. It was so muggy outdoors that coming home from work, she sometimes felt as if she were slogging through warm honey, the air was so hard to breathe, so crowded with heat. Gerard’s parents were taking their children to Egypt this summer, Philip told Rose and Owen one night at dinner. “And last summer it was Atlanta—Six Flags.” He put a forkful of salad in his mouth and said nothing more, but they got the message. “Well,” Rose said to Owen that night, “why not? I have vacation time saved up. We could take the month of August, go west, rent a car.”

  Owen put down his book. “I suppose we could,” he said.

  “I’ve always wanted to do that.”

  “Yes.”

  “Yes.”

  But the trip was really for Philip. They flew to Tucson and rented a car, and for three weeks drove through New Mexico and Arizona and all around California, staying in motels and eating in restaurants with gift shops attached to them in which women wearing Harlequin glasses sold “authentic Indian Artifacts.” Though they hit them all, the big attractions had little interest for Philip. Raised with a View-Master, he was unmoved by the spectacle of the Grand Canyon, while at Disneyland the lines were so long and confusing that he never got to ride the Teacups or the Matterhorn, and as Pirates of the Caribbean was being renovated, he had to content himself with It’s a Small World three times, in a boat crowded with elderly women. Instead it was the smaller tourist attractions that Philip would always remember. Around Santa Cruz, he began to notice a bumper sticker on many of the trailers and Winnebagos their rented car tended to get stuck between. It was yellow, with a great black circle on it, and it pronounced in great black letters: “I’VE BEEN TO THE MYSTERY SPOT!” And sure enough, as they headed north, signs began to appear on the highway, asking, “HAVE YOU BEEN TO THE MYSTERY SPOT?” or declaring, “TEN MORE MILES TO THE MYSTERY SPOT.” And when they finally arrived at the Mystery Spot—a parking lot in the middle of a vast redwood forest—Philip was disappointed that there wasn’t a vast black spot right there, as promised, a perfect charred circle of earth, perhaps a landing pad for alien spaceships. Instead, he and Rose and Owen and three other families were led up a path to a house where gravity was off-kilter and balls rolled up. When they got back to their car, they discovered that a big yellow sticker, just like the ones they’d seen, had been affixed to their bumper, so that it was nearly impossible to remove. They kept going north, and when they began to see stickers declaring, “I’VE CLIMBED THE TREES OF MYSTERY!” Owen shook his head. At Philip’s insistence, they climbed the Trees of Mystery, and braved the Valley of the Dinosaurs, where giant plastic replicas of Tyrannosauri and Brontosauri lunged at nothing in a field of yellow grass. They visited Santa’s Secret Hideaway Village, where there was Christmas all year round, and rusted metal dwarfs and cotton snow decked a few pathetic merry-go-rounds that turned emptily to piped-in carols in the heat. They stopped at the Giant Artichoke restaurant, and at Troutland, where for a dollar apiece you could fish from pools overstuffed with starving trout. And all this Rose and Owen bore stoically, knowing, perhaps, how odd they looked in their eastern clothes, Owen in his button-down shirts and black pants, Rose in her skirts and sandals and sleeveless buttoned blouses. Around them were mothers and fathers in Bermuda shorts and sunglasses, tennis dresses and sunglasses, Hawaiian muumuus and sunglasses. They had loud sticky children, and lots of them, and sometimes, while Owen and Rose were bickering over a road map in the parking lot, Philip would stare longingly as one or another mother attempted to restuff her brood into their Winnebago. The spectacle reminded him of the old woman who lived in a shoe.