by Larry Kramer
He really isn’t like a relative. He’s rich. That whole side of the family is rich, so our side of the family never sees his side. At least that’s why my brothers and I think we’re kept apart. We weren’t to know yet that they had secrets as well.
Mordy has the only father who doesn’t work for the government. Is that why he wants to play with us? Kids so want to belong, and God knows Mordy, who’s driven everywhere in a chauffeured limousine, doesn’t belong. And Abe Masturbov hates Franklin Roosevelt, which is like not believing in God. “Everybody on Sixteenth Street hates everything,” Mordy says about the fancy rich neighborhood where he lives. “Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Winston Churchill and Betty Grable.” He gets into the limousine, his head down because he never wants to go home. “They never mention Hitler. It can’t be possible that they like Hitler.” The car pulls away from Yvonne Street, and I see him looking back at Claudia. I’ve never seen her look at him at all. I sigh. Claudia’s growing breasts and I’m growing pubic hair. Is Mordy growing anything? I sigh again. I am having fantasies of gods with their penises not broken off. Sneaking peeks at dirty books in dark bookstores or in a hated uncle’s suitcase is different from looking at Mordy in the daylight. I sigh some more.
None of us kids in Masturbov Gardens knows what to make of Mordy. He’s the landlord’s son, hence of a higher class, and this landlord, we know, is more than just any old landlord, he’s fantastically rich, owning huge portions of Washington and Franeeda. He, too, is driven around everywhere in his long black Lincoln limousine, which drops Mordy off to play with us. Mr. Abe Jerusalem waves hello. He doesn’t smile much. Why doesn’t he smile more? Maybe he doesn’t like his son playing with us on the wrong side of the District Line.
Mordy doesn’t seem to have any other friends. He joins us as soon as he can be driven from St. Anselm’s School for Boys, which is way far away, almost to Wisconsin and Alhambra, next to St. Fewgh’s Episcopal Cathedral. St. Anselm’s is the best private school in Washington. (Many years later, some St. Anselm’s boys and a few St. Anselm’s teachers and some St. Fewgh’s priests all have sex with each other, and it comes out only because one of the priests gets upset that one of the teachers has a kid he won’t share. The kid will be Stephen’s son, Brian.) It takes an hour to drive from St. Anselm’s to Masturbov Gardens in a limousine. Mordy doesn’t even stop off at home on Sixteenth Street, the House of Mystery we call it, because we have no idea what it looks like inside since we’re never invited over there for cookies like we are to each other’s apartments here. The limousine drops Mordy off on Yvonne Street, at Abe’s office, which is on the highest hill, looking down on all the buildings his father has built. From there Mordy comes racing down to find us.
We have a gang that always plays together. Yes, for all my feelings of loneliness, I have friends. We all have clumsy bodies, unformed things that are trying to become something, but are still between here and there. There aren’t many kids our age in Masturbov Gardens, so we’re kind of stuck with each other. We don’t play with dolls or jacks or bubblegum cards; we don’t know our warplanes or our latest-model cars. Instead, we pride ourselves on outdoing each other in what we can pretend. All of us are powerful and mighty pretenders, which suits me just fine, since I don’t want anyone to know how awful I really am inside.
There are so many places to play! Excavations and incomplete buildings and little forests that haven’t been chopped down yet. We go from one playground to another. We are Kings of This and That, Hardy Boys and Nancy Drews, indefatigable sleuths solving the most elaborate conundrums and protecting our world. I’m particularly adept at dreaming up scenarios that feature runaways determined to get to the big city. Arnold Botts never likes my plots. “How can it be a mystery when they leave because they want to and we know where they’re going?” Arnold is always belligerent. I don’t want to see Arnold naked at all.
But I want to see Mordy Masturbov naked, and kiss him all over, and touch his skin. I’m so very hungry for him. These are my secret thoughts and I haven’t the vaguest notion how to act on them. There’s no one I can tell about them. I can hardly tell myself. I am too young. Isn’t that what every adult you ever knew said when they couldn’t explain something “too grown-up” to you? “You’re too young.”
All these thoughts and feelings—it seems I’ve always had them. Always.
One day I take the requisite two buses to the Masturbov Mansion on Sixteenth Street in the high second alphabet, which is where the big old houses are. (Washington is crisscrossed north to south by numbered streets, east to west by streets that begin with a letter of the alphabet. The first alphabet—A Street, B Street, etc.—is poor and downtown and government. The second alphabet—Alton Street, Byron Street, Calvin Street—is halfway uptown and blends at its farthest end with the third alphabet, Albemarle, Brandywine, Chesapeake, the richest part, by far, and so far away.) Though it’s broad daylight, the sun blistering hot and the heat so vile there’s nobody on the sidewalks, I tiptoe as I circumnavigate the block on reconnaissance like a true Hardy boy. The house sure is big and … ugly. It pains me that my nice new friend lives in a house I’d never want to live in. It’s built of some sort of dark-hued strips of timber like you see in Adirondack lodges inhabited by outdoorsy people like Theodore Roosevelt. It has a funny little one-windowed turret poking out of the roof, short and squat and entirely out of scale with the magnitude of the big boxy house it sits on. The verandahs on all four sides seem much too narrow to have much fun on; even if there were rocking chairs you’d risk rocking right off the edge. All in all, with those verandahs like wings tucked in close and that tiny turret of a head up there, the place looks like some giant prehistoric vulture. It certainly is there, this house. It seems to have a lot of confidence. But I wonder if it knows it’s ugly, all its bravura just for show.
And what about those breasts! I’ve never seen columns with extremely long legs and gigantic breasts. I later learn this is very Egyptian and ancient Greek, but gee, this is Washington.
The lawns are being sprinkled. They’re covered with parched patches, but so are everyone’s during the torrid Washington summers. Branches try hard to hold up their wilting roses and lilacs, the tall bushes planted symmetrically at the corners of the house. There isn’t much else in the way of plantings, no tall hedges to separate this house from the ones on either side, big stone piles with shaded windows, maybe embassies of foreign countries you’ve never heard of. An old man comes out of Mordy’s house. He’s big and burly and has a huge head of pure white hair. He wears a black suit and tie, even in this weather. He stares at me sternly, and so I run. He’s the one who drives Abe and Mordy around. I hope he hasn’t recognized me.
Why am I so interested in so many things that I’m not studying in school? Is such hunger natural? I have an awful lot of secrets. I’m collecting them at much too fast a rate. Should I stop? Why would you ever want to stop accumulating secrets? Anyway, even then I sensed that stopping wasn’t an option.
The practical answer to every question I can’t answer now is: Get out of Masturbov Gardens! But I can’t just yet, not while I’m having these feelings I don’t understand for Mordecai Masturbov. I’ve been planning to run away and look for David. Well, not a real plan, just a thought I’ve been considering every time Philip hits me.
Our gang is pretty hard to describe, except for Arnold Botts. He’s a shit. Nobody likes him, he knows it, but it doesn’t make him self-conscious, apologetic, or eager to please, it just makes him keep being a shit. And we keep putting up with him. He’s the perpetual player of dirty tricks, the one who sneaks up and screams in your ear or tries to pull your pants down or throws ice snowballs at your head in the dead of winter. He has a quick temper that can be set off by unknown forces, and then he explodes with rocks or sand or sticks or words. He has a ferociously precocious imagination that leaves the rest of us in the dust, a repertoire of perversities we’ve never heard of or imagined. I’m still trying to sort out what he ma
de up.
We’re frightened of him, so we try to please him. We the tormented have yet to learn the lesson of standing up for principles and beliefs. If we retaliate in any way, he runs to his mother, who in scant moments is on the phone to ours, embroidering some story he’s told her. Mrs. Botts has an imagination as perfervid as her only child’s, and our mothers are always prepared to believe the worst about us. Each of us has been bawled out mightily for something awful her son told her: that Dodo stuck a stick up Billy’s rectum, that I ripped a bloody Kotex from under one of the French girls’ dresses (causing Rivka to render unto me another of her peculiarly unemotional descriptions, this time of what a Kotex is). This go-round, I sense she’s disappointed in me, either because I didn’t know what a Kotex is or she thinks I do indeed do things like this.
When Arnold blabs that Claudia and I were having sexual intercourse that day underground (Had he been there? How could he have seen us?), our parents are so upset that they meet in the Webb apartment to discuss what to do.
“How can you be so delighted about it all?” I ask Claudia as we’re awaiting the verdict. We’re walking through Masturbov Gardens and she’s humming songs and playing with my fingers and mock-punching me in the belly. It’s one of those summer twilights, soft and warm, with darkness lowering so gently that it’s late at night before it gets dark.
“I’m sorry you think it’s so funny,” I say.
“They think we’ve had sex.”
“I’m sorry you think that’s so funny,” I say, without much of an idea what having sex means.
“Silly billy. It’s not us. They probably haven’t had sex since we were born. They’ll be too embarrassed to even talk about it. How I wish I were under the sofa listening to them. Have they even asked you if you did it?”
I want to answer, “Did what?” but I know that’s really giving it away. “Rivka just asked, ‘What did you do with Claudia Webb underground?’”
“And you said?”
“I told her you were frightened so I held you in the dark as I led you out of the tunnel.”
“I am never frightened!”
When we arrive at the new excavation on Emmanuel Crescent, the gang is there. “Our little lovebirds who screwed!” Arnold announces gleefully as if he’s Gabriel Heatter on the evening news.
Mordy looks very upset. I don’t know yet that he and Claudia actually went much further than she and I, and only hours after, on that same rainy day.
“We didn’t!” I protest, mostly because of what I see in Mordy’s eyes. Why am I protecting his feelings? Do I really think he’s upset because he’d wanted to be with me?
“I don’t know why you’re so ashamed of it,” Arnold retorts. “If I’d screwed Claudia I’d tell all of Masturbov Gardens.”
“You’d tell them even if you didn’t,” says Orvid Guptl, a journalist even then.
“Stop picking on Daniel,” says Billy, a blond boy I remember very little about except that he was sweet and docile and kind, qualities calculated to make anyone forgettable.
“I didn’t know you had it in you,” Dodo says softly, slapping me on the back.
We know already that Dodo Geiseric is the genius among us. He has the thickest eyeglasses you ever saw, he can instantly figure 123 × 1234 without even closing his eyes, and he never has any idea what’s playing at the Masturbov. Because he can rarely remember a movie’s plot or the names of its stars, we tend to overlook his brilliance. Genius in young lives is never appreciated.
“Daniel screwed Claudia! Daniel screwed Claudia!” Arnold singsongs, rushing among scattered bricks and pieces of lumber, deftly maneuvering along the edges of gaping holes where basements will be, leading us across precarious bridges where basements already are. Why do we follow him?
When he’s led us up to what will be a two-bedroom second-floor apartment but is now only a vague wooden outline in space, he stops in the middle of a plank and turns to confront us. He puts his small hand outside his fly and wiggles his thin hips like a gyrating hula dancer, licking his lips and rolling his eyes and grunting and groaning and sighing, as he pretends to be jerking off. As he comes close to me, thrusting, I put up my hands to keep him away and he almost falls from the plank to the cement basement three floors below. But he’s a great balancer, Arnold. He’s a trapeze artist. “Oh, no you don’t,” he says, smiling, his own hands up as if to keep me at bay, to make me think I actually tried to push him off. Then he’s back to his orgiastic oscillations until all five of us boys—Mordy, Dodo, Billy, Orvid, and I—corner him against a wall and jump on him and hold him down until he stops. It takes us a long time. He’s like an active volcano with a lot of lava in it.
Orvid looks down on him. “You really are an inferior human being.”
Arnold doesn’t seem to care. Insults don’t insult him. As always, we let him stay. We’re incapable of getting rid of him. Once we try not talking to him for weeks. He keeps talking to us as if he hasn’t noticed, and before too long we’re answering.
Physically he’s small and moves covertly, like he’s sneaking around trying not to be seen while trying never to miss a thing. His eyes are pathetic: they look at you defiantly, but when you stare him down something isn’t in there looking back. He’s like some nasty pet you keep even though he destroys your house, even as you’re muttering, “He gets away with murder.”
I see Mordy whispering to Claudia. He looks on the verge of tears. We’ve reached a new section of Masturbov Gardens that up to now has been a forest but will be three stories ready for new tenants in a matter of weeks. We’re in a living room with holes waiting for windows and floorboards waiting for shellacking. The walls are up but the doors aren’t in, so I nonchalantly try to listen to Mordy and Claudia, who are on the other side. Arnold, having escaped his torturers once again, has led the rest down to explore the new basement and how it feeds into the underground labyrinthine network over which our entire world is built.
“Oh, Claudia, how could you?”
“Don’t be so pathetic, Mordecai. I simply do not want to entertain this discussion.” I recognize that tone. When Claudia doesn’t want to entertain, she does not entertain. She walks around the wall, takes my arm, and leads me away. It makes no difference to her that I’ve been listening; she probably expected me to. She waltzes me right under the nose of a forlorn Mordy.
The punishment handed down by the Jerusalem-Webb summit is peculiar. Rivka confesses they didn’t know what to do. Philip actually left the meeting and went home to bed.
“Did you … do … what Arnold Botts says you did?”
“I tell you all the time how Arnold Botts makes things up. You never believe me. You always believe him. I am beginning to lose faith in you.”
“Don’t say things like that.”
“You never believe me!”
“Mrs. Webb says Claudia said it was true.”
I screw up my face in thought. It hadn’t occurred to me that Claudia and I would brazen this one out as truth. How like her to neglect telling me this vital piece of whatever scenario she’s playing. In her own way, she’s as untrustworthy as Arnold.
Claudia’s defense? “I didn’t tell you because I automatically assumed that of course you’d want to tell your parents we performed that miraculous act. How could you not want to tell them? Oh, Daniel, what am I going to do with you? Still. Yet. Forever.”
“How could you not?” she says again, years later, when we’re in her room at Doris’s discussing the past. In Doris’s whorehouse. Where Claudia is a hooker. Full-time. High-class. And I’m still her friend. Full-time. Yes, I’m still looking for truths to pinpoint. And she’s still laughing at me.
“The interesting thing is that they believed we could do it,” I say.
“You couldn’t have but I could.”
“Did Mordy?”
“That’s none of your business.”
“Not even today!”
“Not even today.”
“Did you? You did,
then?”
The punishment for our sexual act, whatever it was, is that Claudia and I must visit a priest and “have a discussion on the matter,” as Rivka presents it to me. It’s obviously the Webbs’ suggestion. “I certainly don’t know any priests,” Rivka says, concentrating too hard on shelling peas. “And I don’t want to involve Rabbi Chesterfield.”
“So this is a Christian punishment?” I ask her.
“Don’t be so grown-up. Christian, Schmistian. Your father and I didn’t know what to do. And Mrs. Webb is so … pushy.”
Wearing a black suit and a hat with a veil, Claudia looks twice her age. In my summer short pants and short-sleeved plaid shirt, I look half mine. We will make an unusual sight for Brother Dana. Mr. Webb is driving us in complete silence in the first Cadillac I’ve ever been in. “It belongs to the company,” Claudia says. Mr. Webb, who never speaks much anyway, drops us at the huge Church of the Most Holy Mother, where we are shown into a study paneled in nice warm wood and with a thick maroon carpet on the stone floor. There is incense, and a choir is practicing in the distance, and Brother Dana looks like Bing Crosby in The Bells of St. Mary’s. I have trouble taking in what he says or what he means. I’d no idea priests were so attractive. He has his hand on my knee. I know now what that means. Well, better Bing than Uncle Hyman. I note that I’m beginning to find some humor in all this. I smile to myself. Claudia’s elbow jabs my side. “Pay attention!” she whispers sharply.
Brother Dana is very serious as he says things like, “We must remember the sanctity of the marriage vow and how Jesus Christ wants everyone to be married before procreating.” I ask him what procreating means and Claudia pinches my hand, which she’s holding as part of her act. I can see her, under her dark veil, sticking her tongue out at Brother Dana and me, and trying to cross her eyes and touch her nose with her tongue. Brother Dana rattles on and on; he’s beginning to seem less attractive. After a lengthy passage filled with lots of Catholic terminology, he seems to be winding down. He asks me if I have to go to the toilet and I say no. He asks me if I’m sure, he’ll show me where it is. I decline again, which provokes him to inquire if I want to take confession. I say I don’t know what that is.