In Partial Disgrace

by Charles Newman

  Mooks clearly was not one of Father’s fine dogs, those superior animals who moved through life with aristocratic detachment and dignity, cool and not always accessible. No, Mr. Mooks wore his mongrel origins like a shiny penny, his limbs a pastiche of elongations and foreshortenings, a veritable salmagundi of spots, half-stripes, and even different lengths and textures of coat, patchy and silken by turns, brown and black and white. And Mooks had one brown eye and one blue eye. Crudely drawn, but full of vibrant affirmation, Mr. Mooks looked as if he might carry the sun like a balloon, a sun that was just as mixed up as he was. He seemed to realize that I was just a boy, and that it was not necessary to expend a great deal of bravura protecting me or showing me his version of real life. He crawled up the channel of bedclothes on his belly and laid his tricolor nose upon my chest.

  My first thought was, of course, how Father would take to a stray on the premises. Mooks’s ungainliness, even on a featherbed, suggested that he had not been put on this earth for field and stream. Nevertheless, I took him down to breakfast, where he slunk with perfect humility beneath the table. Mother was for some reason up early, and when Father suddenly burst in from his constitutional, hair awry, cheeks filled with blood, and Mooks lunged at him, I thought the game was up. But Father, apparently filled up with oxygen and endorphins, was oblivious.

  Mooks then began to investigate all corners of the kitchen, where the scents of generations of dogs must have seemed to him almost archeological. He sidled past Mother’s ankles and, fairly spun about by her perfume, let out a bellow of surprise. Then, as Father poured his coffee into the great bowl with the built-in mustache bridge, I realized that Mooks did not exist for them any more than the Voo, and this naturally was a source of considerable relief. I did not want him kenneled with the exemplars of the race, in their private boarding school with its infinite hierarchies, cruel initiations, and arch sophistications.

  Mr. Mooks possessed an inner discipline like no other animal I had ever seen. He was seemingly all but indifferent to food. I never saw him evacuate. He had no voice to speak of, only a low guttural rumbling like a not particularly well-made but nonetheless reliable machine, which I first heard that night from the foot of my bed. When the closet door had opened perfunctorily, and the Voo appeared in all his hunchbacked arrogance, the surface of his fibrous, unfeatured face glistening from the paraffin lamp, Mooks went rigid as a cornerstone as he emitted that ratchetlike growl. The Voo was brought up short and rotated his sluglike body towards us. He was clearly taken aback, although that seemed only to heighten his authority for the moment. But then he straightened up, or rather recongealed himself, and resumed his customary movement to the door and down the hall. Mooks did not move a muscle, and his low growl startled me when the Voo returned, not acknowledging that his retreat to the closet was hastier than usual. I sank a few levels in the general direction of unconsciousness, and was awakened only at dawn. I could not believe it—for the first time I had lost consciousness, tasted the cocktail of oblivion, the vast dissolute ecstasy of total blackout, without feeling and without recall. I was still terrified, but thanks to Mooks, not altogether helpless and alone.

  I spent much of the next night explaining things to Mooks, speculating on what the Voo meant, what we meant to him, as well as how Mooks had chanced upon the one house in all the world which had for its head the dogmeister supreme, holder of Hauptzuchtwart. He listened in a patient, affirmative way, his paws extended and crossed over one another, always alert, though his broken ears sank with a certain despondency when I moved the discussion to the project of our life together.

  The next morning we reconvened at breakfast. Mother again put in a highly eccentric appearance, wheeling about in a whirlwind of activity which produced only cold porridge and some brown apples. Father was not in a good mood, as sheets of rain and lightning had canceled his walk. The day’s blood was still high in his cheeks; the arteries alongside his neck were two blue cords, a barometer of heavy weather. I noticed then that Mr. Mooks’s claws were not only untrimmed but actually curled—except for passing gas, his only really unattractive feature. The nails had grown long, yellow, and hollow, curled under at the ends like a mandarin’s, and made an unpleasant noise upon the stone floor. I was not yet convinced of my parents’ inattention (which was often feigned) to my companion, so I politely asked Mother to set out another plate at the table, which she did with an acrobatic développé. But my father focused upon the small addition to our table setting with intense curiosity.

  “For . . . whom?” he enunciated slowly.

  “Mooks,” I said. “Mr. Mooks.”

  “Mooks?” he repeated, somewhat embarrassedly, thinking perhaps he had forgotten an honored overnight guest. “Mooks?”

  “Mooks is my new friend,” I said. “A dog. I don’t know what kind.”

  The two blue cords on either side of my father’s neck swelled slightly. Though he said nothing, I saw immediately the aspect of betrayal in his eyes. If he had been capable of speaking at the moment, it would have gone something like this: “I have spent a lifetime creating a race of animals which exceed in their deeds and speciespower anything which has yet appeared on this earth. All this I bequeath to you. And you might choose from them any member to lavish your attention on. But no, you must sneak in, like a servant girl, some anonymous insubstantial mutt, and place him at my right hand!” And this, indeed, is almost word for word what he did say to me several days later.

  Mooks seemed to sense this disapproval as he hopped up with downcast eyes upon the bench beside me. But he did not take offense. Father’s eyes were now, as they often were, on the ceiling, which gave him an aspect of those historical figures in bas-reliefs. The fact that he could see no dog there did not in the least mitigate my platonic betrayal.

  Mother, sensing that all was not well, leapt between us, and with a large spoon, plopped a portion of white-hot cream of wheat into Mooks’s plate.

  “We certainly hope Mr. Mooks likes American cereal,” she said.

  As it turned out, he did not. The cereal sat there throughout the day, and then day after day, turning not just cold but gelid, then oddly crusty, and only when it took on a terminal green hue was it removed, a rebuke to my new companion.

  I must say I preferred Father’s hurt feelings and internalized rage to Mother’s hypocritical concession to my new friend, as I have always found intemperate scorn more instructive, and kinder in the long run, than halfhearted lies. This should have told me something important about myself, but what astonished me was that both my parents assumed Mooks’s appearance was due to something they had done or not done. If I had sufficient power, I would have inflicted upon them the Voo himself, that faux friend from the rim of civilization, and not some harmless, innocent, fake animal.

  In any event, due to Mooks’s eternal vigilance, the Voo’s visits became more intermittent, and when he did appear, it was not with quite the same claustral charisma of old. Mooks himself seemed irritated on those nights when he did not make an appearance, and little balls of tension appeared in his short neck. The Voo seemed to be having problems with self-presentation, and with my new companion, rather than gaining any confidence, I was simply losing interest in the tyrant. But as the Voo’s visits became less predictable, he gained the advantage of surprise. His passages were more varied, less choreographed. He appeared at different hours, when I least expected it and Mooks was dead asleep. He also acquired a larger repertoire of gestures and movements, some of them quite bizarre, and once, after a long absence, he appeared in the late afternoon while I was doing sums, in a kind of pathetic shuffle without his lamp.

  One night I awoke to the creak of the closet door, and I could make out by the light of his lamp a newly beguiling Voo, eyes twinkling like kernels of corn in horsemanure, something very like a grin across his fecal-face. He moved without his usual sluggishness and I saw that he had also acquired a companion. At his feet there sat the cutest monster you ever saw, a three-headed hound,
its back covered with snakeheads and the tail of a perfect little dragon. Mooks was stunned silent, obliterate. The monster sat obediently and focused at the end of a velvet rope. I had to give him credit. It was a standoff. The Voo sashayed out into the hall dragging the brute with its tail thrashing behind him. He would not return.

  I believed then, if I could only reclaim the dead language of childhood, that the Voo would disappear from my life, or become a mere augury whom I could interpret as I liked. Indeed, I was becoming bored with my fear and less anxious about its source. The Voo, after all, had a certain authority and detachment which seemed admirable. The magic of in extremis had always appealed to me. His situation was clearly more interesting than mine. From the demands of the infant, one can come to understand the tyrant’s point of view, because it is we in our stinking bedclothes who are most totalitarian. I had never questioned the fact that I deserved to be frightened and judged by this assassin of disfigurement. And I was attracted by a spirit who had the hardness to go to any lengths! In short, I had to summon the honesty to admit that I would have preferred to be very like the Voo, and insert myself into his world, but simply couldn’t muster the wit or will to do so. I had also come to notice that as the Voo was vain and self-regarding, he was basically human, and therefore defeatable. But this in no way made me less interested in what went through the villain’s mind, what it was like to be in his large red shoes. How I missed my absent mute interlocutor!

  As the days went on and I became more attached to Mooks, cosseting him without qualms, hugging him until he burped, I began to have other concerns, not the least of which was the wedge which my small companion had put between me and my parents. I also began to speculate about what would happen if the tyrant, cornered, as it were, might alter his routine, then strike out and injure Mr. Mooks, even sic his three-headed monster dog upon him. Mooks was not their match. He had altered our relations by a kind of irrational bravado, not to mention a certain stupidity which would eventually irritate a cosmic presence like the Voo.

  This was not real sympathy, only a bloated sense of myself, having less to do with self-confidence than a kind of spiritual elephantiasis, mercilessly requiring enormous amounts of new territory and stimulation. How stupid of me not to have made a pact with the Voo before Mooks entered the scene!

  Most disturbing of all, what if the Voo was indeed banished—would Mooks, who had conquered him, not get a swelled head, no longer feel useful, and perhaps disappear? Or would he become, as smug victor, so insupportable in our civil family that I would finally have to hide him out?

  The Voo, for all his threats, did not require interpretation; everyone understood what Vooness was. But Mooks did, and endless lies. Moreover, as I reached out to stroke his rigid little neck, I came to see that out there where he lay was a little bit of me—less easily satisfied perhaps, but certainly more alert and more real. And that indeed if Mooks saw me in this light, he might be tempted to hold his bravery over me, constantly reminding me of my inferiority, and making me appear ridiculous, talking to an underpedigreed dog, all but invisible.

  My insomnia never much improved, though later with the help of kind ladies and fine liquor I was able to enter the closet of total oblivion so necessary to surviving the good life. Buffeted by fate into the most various corners of the world, I have accepted gratefully many a generous and gentlewoman’s easement and aid. But I did not infer even then that as a grown man I would long for those nights of lucid ecstasy, when the door swings open and the madman, the most eternal playmate, punctually presents himself, as you piss all over your insides.

  Finally, the day came when I realized I spent more time worrying about Mr. Mooks—that he might be hurt, abandon me, or show me up, that it would all somehow turn out badly—than anything else. And this caused me more anxiety than the Voo. For if the Voo would never go away on his own, did that also mean that Mooks would live forever? And who after all was the more instructive, or entertaining presence?

  And so one breakfast morning before Father returned from his walk, I asked Mother to remove Mooks’ plate, and hypocritical tears welled up in her eyes.

  “Has Mr. Mooks gone somewhere?” she said. “Is he not feeling well?”

  I did not reply, for I had lost yet another language. Mooks had melted away, spot by stripe, blue eye by brown eye, sentence by sentence. My companion had scurried out of my life without so much as a fare-thee-well, a fact much more mysterious than his appearance.

  MY THREE SWEETHEARTS

  (Iulus)

  I spent my days hiding in various caves, sinks, love holes, and other dips and ducks around the estate, playing with bear bones and animal skulls. My favorite was the funnel-shaped cavern which formed the crypt of Muddy St. Hubertus. Here the Astingi had elaborated the ochre and hematite prehistoric cave drawings with their own gold leaf, reddened yellows, and velvety blues, drawing human figures amongst the shadowy staggered mammals and reptiles, while impudently restoring the scene to two dimensions. And here was the best likeness of my parents and our domestic aura, the mezzotint “Dogface, Mermaid and Boy Exeunting on a Dolphin.” It was not historical, not a memory of olden times, nor did it record an event. It was an image of memory before it became history, bathed in a light which came from a world beyond, venerating access to a personality you didn’t have, and a life you were not going to live. Nor was it, strictly speaking, “art,” for it demanded no protection and offered none. No one controlled it, and mercifully, it had no theme. It presented itself as actual creatures cooperating with the painter, people, and animals whom the painters had actually known, though the elaborations of the subjects were separated by tens of thousands of years. It was something which could not exist in the mind, but it took no leap of imagination to believe that these creatures were still very much alive. The paintings had been covered over the eons with layers of calcite, and within this dull sheen one could make out the black soot torchmarks of various observers through the ages. At a certain angle, I could see a boy holding a torch accompanying the creatures coming toward me. The more I stared at him, the harder he looked at me. I had to get away from him. He was posing as my spiritual guide, and the last thing I wanted was to be alone with God. But I did not lack for playmates. Ophar Osme Catspaw was our resident artiste and intellectual gent. He variously claimed origins in both Persia and Oxfordshire, and indeed perfectly blended those regional affectations into a kind of seamless seediness—a donnish ayatollah, fearing death but hating life. He lived for ideas and rode every recent train of thought through our premises, great dirty brown carriages on wobbly axles with all their windowpanes smashed. He was clean-shaven except for a pair of narrow whiskers on his cheeks; his thin hair of a strange greenish-gray hue was parted in front at the temples. He was constantly adjusting the collar of whatever shabby jacket he was wearing, and even in winter he never put his arms into his overcoat, but wore it slung over his shoulders, his hands contemplatively intertwined behind him.

  He had come to us during Father’s first flush of enthusiasm, the trainer/ patron’s confidence that he might turn willfulness into talent, mere neurotica into a vital névrose. He gave him the Masonic outbuilding for a studio, where in fact he did produce Der Analom, which hung over our dining table, a number of watercolors of Mother running, swimming, or shooting, and a not unflattering oil of my deselfed-self, though, as is often the case with amateurs, the hands were wrong.

  Had he remained, like most of us, a mediocre surrealist with strong political inclinations, he would have been an instructive companion, if only as a check on conventional wisdom. Indeed, Father ran every investment idea by him, and if he assented, promptly did exactly the opposite—and in this contrarian scheme, Catspaw proved nearly infallible and worth every ducat expended on him. But I too learned a valuable lesson from Catspaw—that human beings seem capable of remembering only one story at a time in its entirety, and what passes for the life of the mind is largely the adolescent search for a single variable which explains e
verything. Catspaw was my Yale and my Harvard. He became more famous as a pedagogue than artist, for having one student—me.

  He was also renowned for his great character roles in local drama groups—the gravemakers in Hamlet, the touching fool in Lear, Rageneau in Rostand’s Cyrano, the demented steward in Twelfth Night, and the hierophantic soothsayer in Cymbeline. Indeed, he would often drop effortlessly into these roles in the midst of normal social intercourse, delighting in unnerving our many guests. And rarely would he present a glass of champagne without a Faustian riddle,

  I may command where I adore

  But silence, like a Lucrece knife,

  with bloodless stroke my heart doth gore . . .

  leaving the guest racking his brains for the source of that ghostly echo.

  But my dear parents increasingly lacked the patience to sit for their likenesses, or the vanity to review them, and eventually could no longer afford to purchase his work, which of course made poor Catspaw sullen and moody and even more unkempt than usual. He attended meals sporadically, usually arriving only for dessert, and he spent a great deal of time in the attic trying on the many moldy costumes there. But his most baffling move was his renunciation of painting for the literary life. This proved a great tactical mistake with Father, for husbands have no reason to like modern literature—indeed, it was a pillory for husbands. For years, every wife in every modern novel had walked out.

  “Has she a child?” Father thundered. “She walks out. Has she no child? She walks out! Then she experiments, becomes disappointed, and we are supposed to be gracious! The only reason to write a novel,” he concluded, “is to attract women, but then in the writing of it you have to forsake them, so what’s the point?”