The Barnum Museum: Stories (American Literature Series)

by Steven Millhauser

  THE

  INVENTION OF ROBERT HERENDEEN

  I

  I trace the origin of my perilous gift to an idle morning in the fourth grade. I was seated at my desk before an open geography book with double columns of small print. A gray photograph in one corner showed a banana tree with a sharply focused trunk and high, blurred fruit. In front of me sat Diana Cerino. For a while I studied her complicated black hair and her two raspberry-red barrettes, one of which was tilted at a disturbing angle. I considered how I might go about fixing it without attracting her attention, but already I was losing interest in Diana Cerino’s barrette and in fact her entire existence and was wishing I’d bought one of the pink rubber balls I had seen that morning at Rappoport’s candy store in a shallow box next to the cash register. The box held a tightly packed layer of fifteen identical pink rubber balls arranged in three rows of five. A second layer of eight pink rubber balls rested neatly on the depressions formed by each group of four adjacent balls in the first layer. On the very top, where there was room for three more balls, sat a single pink rubber ball, king of the mountain. The balls cost fifteen cents apiece and I had exactly fifteen cents in my pocket but I had needed time to make up my mind. Now my desire for the unbought ball made me tense and irritable. The minute hand of the big round clock prepared for its jump but did not jump. I sometimes wondered about those clocks. Did time just stop during those suspended moments and then pass in a rush? Was an hour a kind of corpse that sat up with a grin once a minute, only to collapse again with its arms folded on its chest? Was my entire life going to consist of blank stretches of deadness punctuated by feverish rushes? The pink rubber ball would have sat very nicely on the pencil trough between my yellow pencil and the inkwell. Desperately I desired that ball. I saw its precise shade of dark pink, the hairbreadth raised line that encircled the ball and divided it exactly in two, the black, stamped star. I could smell a faint pink rubbery aroma, I felt a bursting sensation in my brain, and there, seated in my pencil trough between my yellow pencil and the inkwell…Ghostly and translucent, it seemed to be trembling slightly. I could see the dim glow of the overhead lights at the top of its smooth pink roundness, shading to darker pink toward the bottom. A peachlike pink bloom dusted the surface. Already my palm tingled in anticipation—but the minute hand jumped, Diana Cerino creaked in her seat, the phantom ball rolled from the desk, dropped to the floor, bounced silently away…

  My name is Robert Herendeen. But really, should I continue? And here let me say that I begin this report against the grain of my own better nature, for I’ve never cared for the confessional tone so dear to our contemporary romantics. If in the course of this rigorous record I happen to bring forth my own feelings, it is I hope never for their own sake but solely for the sake of those other phenomena which I propose to examine in the clear light of—the clear light of!—and which, even now, when I look back on them—but this sentence is already quite long enough.

  I was a precocious dreamer. At the age of one I lay in my crib and saw forest paths winding among fat trees full of cupboards and stairways. At five I imagined detailed houses with manypaned windows and precise fireplaces, all of which mocked the conventional squares with rectangle roofs that alone my childish fingers could manage. Yes, even then I was aware of the painful rift between the vivid images my mind created and the mediocre drawings, clay figures, and stories that I brought to birth in the material world—always to the hysterical praise of some aunt or schoolteacher, who would raise her clasped hands to her throat in an ecstasy of admiration. In the second grade I imagined a story that would fill many volumes and take up an entire shelf in the library, but somehow I never progressed beyond the first chapter. I invented wonderful toys that I never knew how to embody in actual wood or metal. One day in the fourth grade I saw on my desk a pink rubber ball but did not yet understand its meaning. I was very good at making detailed maps of South America and Australia, though I was reproached for my tendency to insert an eccentric twist of coastline here, a little green island just over there. I was well liked by my classmates and received A in everything, but my sense of secret failure was so sharp that I felt stunned with sorrow.

  With the onset of adolescence my powers of imagination, so lively and varied during childhood, took a conventional turn. My sexual fantasies were precise, obsessive, and inaccurate. I was particularly fond of imagining the slow, the very slow, the dreamily slow raising of a dark wool skirt or light summer dress to reveal pastel underpants molding themselves to disturbing bulges. I imagined that girls were quite smooth under there, like rubber dolls, until one day a schoolmate with a beet-colored birthmark on his jaw carefully unfolded a wrinkled photograph. After that I imagined prodigious growths, exuberant and impossible burgeonings. In high school I amused myself by mentally removing the skirts and slips of girls who stood writing on the blackboard. I waited for them to turn, to look at the entire class seated in suspenseful silence, to begin to realize…but they never did, those brazen girls, they just brushed the chalk from their fingers and ambled back to their seats with that little tick-tock motion of hips as if nothing had happened. One evening in the winter of senior year I placed my right hand on the bare upper thigh beneath the charcoal-gray skirt of Carol Edmondston. She looked thoughtful, as if she were trying to remember an address. That spring I took up oil painting without success and planned with a friend a long summer trip that never materialized.

  I went to a good but remote Eastern college and there, amid the hills and snows of northern New England, I became a serious student. I declared myself an idealist, despised all intellectual endeavor tainted by the practical, and double-majored in English and Philosophy, both of which I chose because they bore no relation whatever to actual life. I spent fourteen hours a day in the library and soon earned the respect of my professors, a fact that only heightened my sense of secret failure. About this time my first headaches began. One night in the spring of junior year I undressed Celia Ann Hodges on her oval braided rug during a romantic thunderstorm and was forced to make certain adjustments in the imaginary women who haunted my mind. In the summer between junior and senior year I wrote in ten weeks the draft of a six-hundred-page novel (ten pages a day, six days a week) but for some reason stopped at the end of the penultimate chapter and never completed it. In November, December, and January of senior year I began a comedy, a tragedy, and a tragicomedy, respectively, all three of which I destroyed one night during spring break. Shortly afterward I received Highest Honors for my senior thesis, “The Role of Metaphor in the Philosophy of Locke.” On the night before graduation I stayed up till dawn explaining to a girl I had met at midnight that great work can be accomplished only in solitude, and the next day, an hour after returning my cap and gown, I traveled by train to my family home in southern Connecticut.

  My father, pleased by my good grades but troubled by the vagueness of my plans, had agreed to let me live at home for a year before I went to law school or business school or took some job or other or did something, anything. I moved into the spare room in the attic and threw myself into several ambitious literary projects, which soon came to nothing. I began to invent a series of artists’ lives that I planned to assemble in a book of fictional biographies, but one night I noticed that all of them were failed artists and I abruptly abandoned the plan. By mid-August I was going to bed at five in the morning and waking at one in the afternoon. I began reading long books, which fired my ambition without leading to anything in particular: The Anatomy of Melancholy, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, the complete letters of Byron in twelve volumes. By October I was sullen and irritable. I refused to apply to graduate school, stating to my father that I would rather hang myself than enter a finishing school for mediocrity. My father said that I couldn’t hang myself without a rope and that a rope cost money. My father’s ironic attitude caused a coolness between us but he did not press matters after that. I began borrowing books on architecture from the library and invented in vivid de
tail gorgeous villas, gardens, palaces, country estates, amusement parks. On December 31 I wrote a thirty-four-page suicide note that I destroyed on January 1. In the spring I left home to work in a bookstore in a small town near my college and returned a month later with the plan for an American epic in fifty cantos, one for each state. My father agreed to support me for one more year if I promised to apply to business school in the fall. I returned to my attic life. The book came to nothing and I took up the study of Latin and Italian. At this period I began to have dull, gentle, persistent headaches, nothing bad, not really, but definitely noticeable. One warm spring night an exhilarating idea came to me.

  In the week before my idea I had been puzzling over a problem. It seemed to me that a distinction should be made between two types of artistic sterility. In one type, the imagination remains a horrible blank, its mechanism simply refuses to create images, or else produces hopelessly banal or dead ones, greenish little corpses with waxen features. Would-be artists suffering from this form of sterility can do nothing but admit defeat, turning their attention to less exacting pursuits or perhaps shooting themselves between the eyes, as the case may be. In the second type, the imagination remains strong, perhaps too strong, and the sufferer’s torment consists in his inability to embody his meticulous imaginings in a medium. This type, though superficially resembling the first, since both issue in nothingness, is nevertheless far more hopeful, for its cure depends on the discovery and mastery of a medium. My own case was clearly of the second type, since my image-making faculty, far from being impaired, was almost disturbingly strong and resulted in vivid, detailed, elaborate eidola, which longed for release.

  My parents’ house stood about a mile from a small public beach where I sometimes strolled at night. On the warm spring night when my idea came to me I was walking on the hard sand below the ragged line of mussel shells, cracked crabshells, and seaweed. The brilliant moon, much too round, gleamed in the wet flat sand by the water’s edge. I thought of my uncertain future, my failed past, my oddly becalmed present—cast up as I was in the attic of my father’s house—my restlessness, my wistfulness, my inner riot mixed with outer calm, my headaches, my eyeaches, my sense of not yet having entered into my proper adulthood combined with my sense of being eighty-seven years old, my rancor, my languor, my soul-soreness, my sighs. I was beginning to enjoy this list and wondered whether I could extend it indefinitely when all at once I felt tired, immensely tired, as if I had not slept in a long time. It occurred to me that I hadn’t really slept well for a long time, even as a child I was a terrible sleeper, the slightest noise startled me awake. By this time I had come to an abandoned lifeguard chair and in obedience to an obscure impulse I began climbing up the side in order to sit looking out over the moonlit water with a melancholy expression. It was as I was climbing up the side that my idea came to me and I reached the top in a state of high excitement. I decided to invent a human being by means of the full and rigorous application of my powers of imagination. Instead of resorting to words, which merely obscured and distorted the crystalline clarity of my inner vision, I would employ the stuff of imagination itself. That is to say, I would mentally mold a being whose existence would be sustained by the detail and energy of my relentless dreaming. My ambition was to create not an actual human being or a mere work of art but rather a being who existed in a realm parallel to the other two—a third realm, obedient to the laws of physical bodies but utterly discarnate.

  I hadn’t expected my task to be an easy one, in fact I distrusted all forms of work accomplished without difficulty, but within a week I was snappish with failure. In my effort to be rigorous I had proceeded step by step, from the inside out, in the manner of a painter who imagines the musculature beneath the skin, but what I achieved was only a heap of dead parts—a rib cage, a pile of twisting bluish-red arteries, a carefully molded heel shading into vagueness. What I needed was something else, something else entirely. One night I thought of the name Olivia. At once an image formed. Silently she hovered before my imagination’s eye. There were vague places here and there, her hair was uncertain, I knew nothing about her knees, her nose, her history, but these were matters that I could attend to at leisure.

  Leisure! Well, I suppose so. But from that moment I knew no peace, only the obscure ecstasy of creation. I made elementary errors, revised my mistakes, pushed on. Despite my vivid sexual imaginings in adolescence and beyond, despite Celia Ann Hodges, I had never made the attempt to visualize a girl or woman or any human being in exhaustive detail. I spent two nights and two days imagining her hands, summoning them out of vagueness into the precision of being. On the third night I realized that I had still failed to envision the exact pattern of veins on the back of each hand, the movements of the skin between the fingers, the intricate configuration of creases on each reddish knuckle. It seemed to me that only by an act of fanatical precision could I knit her into existence, rescue her from the continual tug of vagueness that is only one step removed from nothingness. I lavished a ferocity of attention on her eyelids, the folds and shadows of her ears, the muscles of her neck. Her clothes proved unexpectedly difficult to see precisely: the puckers of skirt at the waist, the arrangement of threads in the front and back of a button, the system of creases in the sleeve of a moving arm. Although she had appeared to me in a rather demure costume—dark blue denim skirt reaching to her knees, plain white cotton blouse with small transparent buttons—I rejected the temptations of modesty and applied to her breasts, her thighs, the folds of her vulva, the coloring and structure of her buttocks, the same rigor of attention that I applied to her eyebrows and toes.

  Sometimes, in weariness, I removed my attention from her to contemplate some peaceful inner landscape. Then I returned in alarm to find odd gaps and distortions in her, as if without my sustained attention she tended toward dissolution. One night she walked from my desk to my reading chair and sat down; I realized that I had failed to imagine the precise system of motions that constitute a human walk, and threw myself into new feats of arduous imagining. Errors repeatedly erupted. One night when she walked from my attic room down two flights of stairs to the living room, I realized that I had been careless in managing her stair-by-stair descent, permitting her to fade away and reappear in the manner of a trite ghost.

  It was these fadings, these absences of attention, that I found most difficult to overcome, in the laborious weeks that followed; and as the nights grew warmer, and through my attic window I smelled the dark green scents of summer and heard the shouts of children, the clang of a bell, the rush of roller skates on driveways, the soft thunk thunk of a dribbled basketball, I had the sense of being borne up by all the rich blue summer night and carried toward a far, desired shore.

  On the night of July 16 my work was done. In the center of my dark room the unlit standing lamp with the bent brass neck stood looking down at the leather pad of my crowded desk. The cracked leather desk-chair where I had been sitting was partly turned to one side. I was lying on the bed by the double window, beneath the drawn blinds that reached to the bottom of the slightly raised windowframe. Bits of moonlight entered through the edges of the blinds and polished a leg of the mahogany desk, a few brass buttons in the back of the leather chair, a coffee cup resting on a book. She stood at the side of the desk, resting one carefully veined hand on a corner. She was gazing toward a window. Suddenly she lifted her other hand and swept a piece of hair back over an ear. It was a gesture we had practiced many times. Beneath the white cotton sleeve of her lifted arm I knew that a long vein in her forearm pressed through the skin and curved toward the inner bend of her elbow. Her nostrils tensed at the sound of a distant car; a faint breathing was audible. Perhaps it was a memory of the last feverish and draining months, perhaps it was the clarity of her presence there, perhaps it was the sense of a long task carried to fulfillment, anyway I felt in my chest a deep upwelling, my nose burned, my eyes prickled, and turning my face away I paid Olivia the dark homage of my tears.


  II

  I ask myself: was there a flaw, a little fatal flaw? Was there at the very outset an error in conception or construction that by the operation of unalterable laws was bound to bring my work to a disastrous end? Without arrogance I think I may answer: No. Oh, there may have been some very minor lapse here or there, some lack of precise imagining that spoke of Olivia’s kinship with all that is unshaped and unborn, but the vividness, the clarity, of her being was beyond all doubt. Indeed I would argue that insofar as our existence is confirmed or strengthened by our presence in a mind outside our own, her existence was far richer than that of the beings we call human. For we are imagined carelessly and in patches, you and I, we’re ghosts and phantoms all, fading away and reappearing at the whim of amateur imaginers, whereas Olivia—well, Olivia was imagined with an artist’s passionate exactitude. And just as the enticing vividness of a painting or statue derives in part from the intensity of our attention, so the creature I had pressed forth night after night from the malleable stuff of my imagination flourished by virtue of the accumulated acts of attention that I had lavished upon her. Then why, at the very moment of my triumph, did I feel a twist of anxiety?