We went to the bank together. The manager, deferential in the face of my father’s climbing stature in the financial world, presented copies of the withdrawal receipts that showed my name scrawled on the signature line. It was obviously not my writing. I was pretty sure I recognized Uncle Lee’s handwriting, but I knew he never would forge my signature without my mother’s prodding. His loyalty to his sister easily trumped his love for his nephew, especially since I was sure she had told him the whole Hofstra story. I also knew that in Lee’s judgment, he had done nothing wrong. I hurt my mother by leaving home against her wishes. I had not been a good son like he was to Gramsie. When his parents told him to return from Harvard Law School and help with the family business, he gave up his life and career as a lawyer unhesitatingly. I didn’t.
In the end, my mother did not deny that Uncle Lee forged my signature, although she insisted the funds were, in fact, hers, since I had been under eighteen and in her custody. My father said I should take her to court and that he would pay for a lawyer. I was so angry that I seriously considered it. But then I remembered how strapped she was for money and what her life was like. Possibly even worse than before. I thought of the boxes stacked up in her bedroom, and the copy of Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking on her bed. My father had not simply deserted her. He manipulated things so that he paid her almost nothing in alimony, and stood idly by as she was humiliated by creditors and evicted from our apartment on 86th Street. He instructed his attorneys to keep postponing hearings until she was left with nothing but Gramsie’s food and Leon’s loyalty. For some reason, I thought of advice my father had given me more than once in the event I was held up.
“Always fight dirty,” he advised. “Find out who the ring leader is—then go up and kick him in the balls. Then start swinging your bat—wildly—that’ll stop ’em.”
As he told me this, I sensed the sensual thrill he got from imparting this wisdom to his son, just like the time I tried out for the basketball team and he told me the key to stopping your opponent from out-rebounding you under the basket was to “accidentally” stand on your opponent’s sneaker as he tried to jump. But I couldn’t do it, not even in practice. I never could.
When I went to my mother’s apartment to collect my things for the move to Riverside Drive, she informed me she would be better off dead.
“What’s the whole life for?” she mused, “I have only my two precious boys, and one of them has already abandoned his mother. Go to your father. You only care for him anyway. Go to him and his whores.”
I remembered a particular redhead named Betty with a young son. He went to horse shows with her and had even bought her a horse. Later, there was the blonde from Scarsdale. I knew the woman, whom he addressed as “Mrs. Jeffries,” and who I knew was married to one of his business associates, so what was she doing alone with him in his apartment? He did have women around a lot now; for all I knew they might be whores.
My brother remained steadfastly loyal to Mom, and she rewarded him with extravagant gifts she couldn’t possibly afford. Whatever he asked for, she found some way to obtain. Knowing his love for cars, she acquired a Ford LTD for him when he turned sixteen. I think that what Bobby wanted was to leap over childhood and adolescence, and land directly into prosperous and sedate middle age. An LTD, the heavy, stolid car of a wealthy, middle-aged businessman, was exactly right for him. Even as a teenager.
Mom and Uncle Lee were inseparable during the year I spent at college. They were more like a happily married couple than any married couple I ever knew. Each morning, he called at precisely 6:00 a.m. to say hello and whisper, “Wake up, Beautiful!” At 10:00 o’clock at night he called again and said, “Sleep tight, Baby!” They had all their meals together and watched TV until it was time for her to walk back to her apartment on 72nd Street. They were both enamored of Norman Vincent Peale and attended his lectures and seminars. Mom felt protected and loved at last. When she spoke to me, every conversation concluded not with hanging up on me, but with the obligatory sing-song refrain: “Every day and in every way, things will get better and better.”
One morning, I woke up and it was August, time to think about returning to Madison for my sophomore year. I said goodbye to my little apartment on Riverside Drive (my father “loaned” me the money, although he refused my efforts to repay him from the pittance I got from my part-time job operating a switchboard at Columbia). Sunlight streamed through the curtains, and everything felt different—I felt like a man who wakes up after having been in bed for weeks with a fever. I felt well. And the most curious thing was that I hadn’t even realized how sick I had been. The illness, contracted in a particularly virulent form, was adolescence. And although I knew only too well I was not to be mistaken for an adult, something in my body told me that I had weathered a storm and survived. I was now about to start the next chapter of my life.
9.
As my second year of college swung into gear, I missed Laura. I rationalized her absence by deciding that a certain self-imposed, monastic isolation would be good for me as I pursued my real vocation, whatever that might be. I practiced the same kind of abstinence toward my love of sports. I had been drawn to Wisconsin since its football team had lost so heroically in the 1963 Rose Bowl. I could have gotten tickets to any game I wanted since the team was terrible and there were plenty of empty seats, but I never attended a single game in the four years I was there. This was not because I didn’t want to watch the team lose, it was because I thought that depriving myself of something I wanted would make me stronger, and help me develop as an artist.
On Saturday afternoons I remained in my room and chose something impressive and grand from my bookshelf, while the rest of my peers, as I thought, wasted their time with something as frivolous as going to the football game, cheering “OHHHH SHITTT” as another game was fumbled away. While everyone else was at Camp Randall stadium, I curled up in my room with my penknife, a wedge of Gouda, a loaf of crusty bread, and Milton’s Paradise Lost as company. Above the bed stood a nineteenth-century print I had found in Paul’s Bookstore on State Street of a strange gypsy girl gazing wistfully into space, longing for me perhaps. Her name, I decided, was Esmeralda. On my stereo I listened to Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto. However, since I passionately loved football, I couldn’t stop thinking about the game I was missing. Unable to concentrate on Milton, I stayed in my dorm eating Gouda and listening to the game on radio. When it was over, I felt guilty, depressed, and sick from eating all the cheese.
After ending things with Laura, I resumed my uniform of black sport coats and ties and didn’t participate in classes any longer, preferring to watch intently, defiantly, and above all, judgmentally. If someone said something that I considered stupid or banal, I stared at them from a remote corner of the classroom. I thought I could somehow compel them to psychically confess their folly with my disdainful glares. This, of course, never happened.
There was one girl, though. She sat across from me in my Afro-Asian history class and had long hair the color of Greek honey. I never tried to pin her down with my withering stare. Instead, I watched the way her blue cable-knit turtleneck sweater clung to her breasts. So I suppose I did stare, just in a different way. Once, she asked if she could borrow Lady Murasaki’s The Tale of Genji, a novel we had been assigned to read for Monday. There were no copies left at the bookstore, she said, pushing her hair back over her shoulder. Her name was Patty.
It was a surprisingly warm Saturday morning in October when I walked over to Showalter dorm to lend her the book. She took it, and after a few moments of strained silence, asked if I wanted to walk along the lake. I said yes. She was animated and enthusiastic and seemed to love life. She had a crazy sense of humor, which was different from other girls I had met. She also said she had once seen me throwing rocks at the ducks on the lake one day while her younger sister was visiting.
“Rocks at ducks?” I said, reddening at being caught in the act. She knew that I wasn�
�t really trying to hit them, of course. She said this in a way that told me she knew I was doing just that, but even though we both knew I had done this really weird thing, she didn’t hate me for it. Her younger sister had seen me, too, and said I was cute, but asked why I dressed like an old man. I liked the idea that they were watching me, talking about me, and that someone thought I was “cute” even if I had been spotted throwing rocks at the ducks.
We continued walking, then headed to the off-campus Arboretum. We saw a field with apple trees, and sat down on the grass. At first we just sat; then I decided to pick the apples. I had a little penknife with me and tried to peel the skin off an apple in one go like Gramps had done when I was a child. I still couldn’t do it. I sliced up one of the apples and started feeding Patty slices, slowly at first, then faster and faster. When I tried to force the last one into her mouth, she laughed. I loved her laugh. It wasn’t a sultry laugh like Laura’s, but it wasn’t a little girl’s giggle, either. It said laughter was all right; laughter was nothing to be ashamed of.
I kissed her. Her kisses felt different than Laura’s, but wonderful in a less experienced way. We lay down in the field in and hugged. Then the air grew cooler and I took in the scent of the apples mixed with the honeysuckle of her hair.
When we woke up it was cold and dark. I draped my jacket over her shoulders. As we headed back, she noticed a primitive sign.
“Oh, my God!” Patty said. “How could we have missed that?”
“What?”
“That sign! Those apples were sprayed with pesticide!”
“Well, at least I’ve spared you a horrible death. Thank God for that. As far as I can recall, I was the one who touched the apples and peeled them, right?”
“My hero!” she swooned and fell into my arms, Camille-like, then pretended to breathe her last there upon the grass. I lay back with her and we kissed.
This was our first date. We had been together twelve hours.
When we reached the dorms, it was midnight and past curfew in the women’s dorms. We knew Patty was going to be “campused,” forbidden from leaving her dorm after dinner, even to go to the library. She was summoned before the Judicial Board, and told she could not leave the dorm for a whole week for her transgression. The next day I snuck into her dorm room and stayed there, pressed against her warm body until morning. We were recreating a scene from Romeo and Juliet with her roommate, Barb from Oshkosh, as the Nurse, posted as lookout to make sure no one saw us. At daybreak, I climbed out her window and scrambled onto the lawn and back into my dorm room without being detected.
Within a week of our first date, however, we broke up. In fact, we broke up all the time. Sometimes, our fights had to do with my jealousy; she refused to tell her St. Louis boyfriend that she was seeing me and me alone. Sometimes, I deliberately picked fights because I was terrified about the closeness of a relationship, which troubled my self-conception. I didn’t exactly know what that conception was, but I knew it didn’t involve dating a nice Jewish girl from St. Louis named Patty Cohn. Things came to a head after Patty confessed to an affair with her T.A. before we’d met. I exploded, neglecting to mention my own illicit sessions with Laura the previous year. After that, there was our Afro-Asian History professor who asked Patty to come to see him during office hours. Thinking it was about her work, which had begun to suffer a bit after meeting me, she complied only to be blindsided—he wanted to talk about our relationship, not her work. He said I seemed crazy, that she should stop seeing me. He told her she had “stepped out of a painting by Rubens; your sad friend out of one by El Greco. I’ve never seen a more ill-matched pair. That boy is clearly unstable. Is he seeing a psychiatrist?”
When she told me, I began to scream that he obviously wanted her for himself—that’s what these professors do, I said. I was furious that she would even listen to that pompous windbag and stomped out, leaving her alone, crying. An hour later, I called and apologized. She refused to accept it. I called back and we made up.
Near the end of the semester, Patty surprised me by breaking off her relationship with her St. Louis boyfriend, whom everyone back home considered her fiancé. She invited me to spend time with her at her home in St. Louis over winter break. I said if we were still seeing one another by then, I would come. Christmas vacation was weeks away, and it didn’t look like we would make it. But I had no other plans, and was certainly not looking forward to returning to New York at Christmas, or any other time.
On the flight to St. Louis, I fell asleep with my head thrown back against the headrest. When I awoke, my neck was completely stiff. We were met at the gate by a crowd of relatives. Patty’s parents were there of course, along with her sister who had seen me throwing rocks at ducks and thought I was cute, her grandfather and his redheaded girlfriend, and several aunts and cousins.
I greeted her family with my head down, unable to make direct eye contact because of my neck. Was this new boyfriend pathologically shy or otherwise deeply disturbed? There were whispers as the relatives helped with my luggage. Still averting my eyes, I mumbled something about seeing the Arch. Patty’s ten-year-old cousin blurted out that was impossible—it must have been the McDonald’s by the airport, since the Arch, recently erected in 1966, was in the other direction.
Taking our bags into the house, I lifted my head to the other position available to me—straight up. The sky looked huge. I hadn’t noticed a sky like that in Madison, so it must be something unique to St. Louis. Patty led me through the door to their home since I was unable to look anywhere but up or down. On the dining room table, a lavish spread had been laid—none of which I was able to touch, given my dietary proclivities: smoked salmon and whitefish, corned beef, sour pickles, mustard, and two huge glass bowls of tuna and egg salad. I figured that I would be able to eat the pickles and mustard, along with a bagel. Within seconds, the brightly colored room was filled with life. It wrapped itself around me in a tight embrace. I kept apologizing that my neck was stiff, and no, I could not eat corned beef, whitefish, tuna, or egg salad. Patty’s bright fourteen-year-old sister, Racey, kept asking why I had become a vegetarian? If I couldn’t eat egg salad or tuna fish—what could I eat? Having seen me heaving rocks on Lake Mendota, she asked Patty why I was now so concerned about a tuna sandwich when I thought nothing about possibly killing ducks indiscriminately a few months previously.
After our meal, Patty’s father, Max, distributed our luggage (we had to sleep in separate rooms, of course), and announced he was going to take their Pekingese for a walk. I went along. He wore a tweed cap, and we smoked our pipes. It was beginning to snow, and I glanced up at the huge expanse of white St. Louis sky. What a strange world I had stumbled into! Max walked a few steps ahead with the little dog, and I noticed his shoes were worn unevenly at the heels. Overweight and balding, his front teeth were yellowed from decades of pipe smoking. He hadn’t said much until now, but as we continued on our walk, he began to open up. First, there was the snowfall and how lucky we were to have arrived before the ten to twelve inches were dumped on St. Louis. As we walked up the hill, he told me how his whole family had moved into or close by their subdivision. They all lived within a quarter mile of one another. In my family, they would have already been sarcastic and fighting. Here everyone was friendly, even loving, towards one another—amazing! He told me he had worked for his brother’s printing business since high school and had never attended college.
“Harold handles all our accounts, bookwork, and what not,” he said. “I do the printing. That’s the way it’s been for more than twenty years now, and I hope it will never change. We’ve never had a single disagreement. Not ever. Even Harold’s wife Nettie and my Edna love each other like sisters,” he smiled. What kind of Twilight Zone episode had I stumbled into? Here it was normal to have close, loving relationships. Even pets were not neurotic like Blackie—helplessly chained to his urine in the kitchen until attempting suicide. It didn’t seem banal or trite—it seemed beautiful in its very simplici
ty. Max had no aspirations beyond working six days a week at Press-Craft, and providing for his wife and two daughters. He wasn’t articulate or even particularly interesting, but he had no hate or envy and truly loved his family. A few months ago, this would have seemed pathetic, even contemptible to me. Now it appeared beautiful—the way a family should be. Perhaps my New York world wasn’t the real one. Perhaps family could be more than a poison tree.
Max spoke nostalgically about serving in the Fifth Armored Division during World War II, and the camaraderie in his Intelligence unit. I couldn’t imagine how this poorly educated, simple man could engage in espionage. He laughed like a little boy recounting the time he got lost behind enemy lines. They sent a whole platoon to search for him, and he suffered a demotion to Staff Sergeant. He took the pipe from his teeth and his eyes watered as he recalled his rescue. The tears were not a lament for his disgrace, they were tears of gratitude and affection for buddies who had risked their lives and brought him back alive.
I thought about my own father, how he had not served in the military, and had never confided in me a single time. Never had he shared a single moment of vulnerability or intimacy, and the soles of his shoes would most certainly never be unevenly worn. Our communication, on the rare instances when we had it, was always about my deficiencies, my weaknesses, never his. For all I knew, he had none. Despite my father’s arrogance and pride—in his intelligence, his ambition, his infallible sense of what was proper and right, he had never served his country or risked his life. I couldn’t help thinking that Max—so insignificant beside my father’s brilliantine hair and moustache, his money and power—had discovered the secret to something about which my father didn’t have a clue: how to receive love from others and love them back in return.
The Poison Tree Page 22