Andrew's Brain

by E. L. Doctorow

  Briony was calling to him from the house, waving, smiling. He turned and noticed the parents’ car that he had parked behind, a red Morris Minor. You didn’t see many of those anymore. At the door, Briony took his hand. They’re out back, she said. And in the short walk through the house to the garden Andrew had the impression of—what to call it—a prosthetic house? The stairway to the second floor was made of shallow half steps, the upholstered chairs and sofa in the living room had attached footstools. The center island in the kitchen was stepped. Whatever needed to be used came with graduated access, handrails. And the place smelled very clean, antiseptic almost. All of this Andrew perceived peripherally as he passed through the house and to the garden where there, smiling and rising to greet him, and not crippled or maimed at all, were Briony’s parents. I’m Bill, he said. I’m Betty, she said.

  The fact that I was a college teacher was in my favor. These were retired show-business people with great respect for the education they never had. And so loving of their daughter that they trusted her judgment. Never even a raised eyebrow for this man twice their daughter’s age. Gave me a hearty welcome. So I had worried for no reason. There were bottles and an ice bucket on a tea caddy. You name it we got it, Bill said. We had drinks, Briony sitting close to me on the settee, glancing at me for my reaction. But Bill and Betty were classy, they had the social ease of longtime performers. They were young-looking given that they were retirees. It’s hard to tell with Diminutives.

  Diminutives?

  You don’t want to patronize them. “Midgets” is beyond the pale. Derives from the insect the midge. And “Little People” is not much better.

  You’re saying Briony’s parents were midgets?

  Only out of their hearing.

  My goodness. And “Diminutives” was their term of choice?

  That’s my term. They didn’t speak of themselves descriptively. You just look at them and you go into the politically correct mode. To my credit I didn’t even blink the moment I saw them. Just an example of the brain’s synaptic speed. It had probably told me what I’d find as I’d walked through the house.

  Why hadn’t Briony warned you?

  I don’t know. Could she have been testing me? My reaction a measure of my character? But it couldn’t have been that. Briony was incapable of any kind of subterfuge. And she was too self-aware to act unconsciously. And why should she warn me? We were seriously together—why would something like that matter? They were her folks, who were in her sight lines from the day she was born. She loved them. And given their sociability with others of their like she was raised in an aura of normality, not being the only child in that situation. You don’t go around apologizing for your mom and dad.

  But what young girl of even normally proportioned parents will not say something in advance by way of softening their effect? A parent is a person who embarrasses you.

  Well, this was Briony. This was the girl who led me up the mountain. She was in all ways enigmatic. I was deeply in the world of her affections—why wouldn’t I know already, without being told, that her parents were tiny? What can I say that will satisfy you? En route to CA, she gave her dog away to some kid who worked at the motel where we stayed one night. At the time, I didn’t know why she would do that—after impulsively bringing it along, naming it Pete, and then giving him away to someone, and with a dollar or two to buy some kibble. She knelt and hugged the dog and looked on sadly as the kid walked him away on a leash. Perhaps that was the acknowledgment you’re looking for. When I saw Briony take her mother in her arms and hold her as you would a child, when I watched her kneeling to hug her father, I could see why she might have had second thoughts about Pete the dog. He was big. Had a tail on him that could crack your fibula.

  I just remembered—she did tell me one thing, Briony. She asked me not to talk politics with her father. My last-minute instructions. We were just approaching the family manse. She kissed my cheek. Oh, and, Andrew, please, please, no politics, OK?

  What was that about?

  We were in Orange County, CA, the land of love it or leave it.

  How did Briony know what your politics were? I can’t imagine new lovers talking politics.

  Lovers live in each other’s minds. Briony found in mine a degree of civic intensity that she recognized from her father’s conversation. Except I was of a different era.

  I see.

  You don’t know everything about me, Doc, you’re only hearing what I choose to tell you. I’ve always responded to the history of my times. I’ve always attended to the context of my life.

  The context.

  Yes, as it ripples in concentric circles all the way out to the stars. Bill was a bright little man and I did honor Briony’s request, though it wouldn’t have occurred to me in any case as a guest in this house to tease out our political differences. But between Bill and me, I would say I was the truer patriot. If you keep the larger picture in mind you can’t be convinced of the permanence of this country. Not when you know who’s running it.

  As you do?

  Oh, yes! As I know myself.

  Bill and Betty were not disproportioned dwarves, with large heads or torsos, and short legs, they were perfectly proportioned, everything in harmony with everything else. They lived on what I assumed was a fixed income and took pains to live meticulously and with dignity. Bill was show-business handsome, his small fine features and pale blue eyes obviously the source of Briony’s good looks. He was somewhat florid, with a head of white hair neatly pompadoured. Betty had the flat doll-like face more often seen in Diminutives. They dressed as Southern Californians, in light colors, crisp slacks, shirts and blouses, penny loafers for him, open flats for her. Betty was a bit stout of figure, but with her dyed brown hair done up in a short bob, and a lovely smile and a face whose default expression was sympathetic understanding. With their outgoing personalities they did emanate the show-business life they had lived. They had toured with various troupes of performing midgets, singing, dancing, or serving in World’s Fair tableaus in the native costumes appropriate to various foreign pavilions. They told me all about it. They had played Las Vegas. An entire wall in Bill’s study was covered with photographs—inscribed headshots of entertainers I’d never heard of. They’d done some television, toured with Ringling Bros., there were pictures of Betty standing on a cantering horse, of Bill dressed as a drum major and leading a band of clowns. But never sideshows, Bill said, it never came to that and if it did we still wouldn’t.

  Tell me, Doc, why do things in miniature bring out our affection? Like those little metal cars we all played with as kids that were models of real cars. How important to us that they were accurate to scale. And what about cats, I never liked cats but I could play happily with a kitten, testing its reflexes with a piece of string. And here were Bill and Betty. Toy people, kitten people, accurate to scale. The idea of them was alluring, each moment in their presence was as original as the moment before. It was as if you had traveled to another land, some exotic place on earth that you could write home about, if you had a home and someone there to write to. Not everyone can hope for the experience of being made welcome by these people and treated as an equal, as it were, as if that weren’t in itself funny.

  So your affection was that of a superior, a taller, grander version of humanity.

  Not necessarily. After a few days they were the norm. With the four of us at the dinner table, Briony seemed huge in my eyes, she wore a dress for dinner and had her hair combed back and reaching almost to her shoulders. She was this lovely but ungainly Alice in Wonderland. Me, I was under the illusion that if I stood up too suddenly I’d bang my head on the ceiling. And their voices, Bill’s and Betty’s, lacking timbre, something like trumpets played with mutes, were sometimes difficult to hear, as if they were communicating from a great distance.

  When one morning Briony and her mother went off in a taxi to shop at a mall, Bill sat me down in their little backyard garden for our morning coffee, lit himself a ciga
r, crossed his little legs, waited for me to speak of something so that he could tell me what he knew about it. There was an assertiveness to him, some inner demand that he prove himself to whatever person of normal stature he happened to be with. He was a kind of pouncing conversationalist. When I mentioned that Briony and I had been reading Mark Twain aloud, he shook his head and said, What do you think of the ending of Huckleberry Finn, Professor? It’s a goddamn disaster, isn’t it? Ruined the whole story for me. When Tom makes his late entrance, it’s Twain throwin’ in the towel, coming in with his trickster shtick to wrap things up and while he’s at it to make the whole grand thing of Huck and Jim going down the river neither here nor there. I know a little bit about the cruelties of life and I’ll tell you, this is a damn shame of an ending, Twain bein’ in such a hurry to finish his tale any which way and so crap up what might have been a huge story for all time.

  Did you know, Bill, that he stopped work on that book for seven years before coming up with the ending?

  Sure I knew, that’s what I’m sayin’. Couldn’t work it out, and said, Damn it all, I’ll just get this thing off my desk. Some more coffee?

  Actually, Andrew, I happen to agree with that criticism.

  I asked about The Wizard of Oz—had he ever worked maybe not in the movie, that was an earlier generation, but in some stage version? He took a big hit on his cigar and set it down in the ashtray. Professor, never mind the movie, you got to read the book. You haven’t, have you?

  Got me there, Bill.

  According to some, the whole thing is communist.

  What is?

  The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. See, what the moral is, is don’t rely on me, don’t trust me, my rule is a scam, you’ve got the stuff to run things yoursels. You and your comrades. All you got to do to take over is get up your courage, use your brain, everone’s your equal, ’cept for some at the top, of course, and the world’s your oyster. That’s communist allegory, according to some.

  I don’t know, Bill. An allegory—doesn’t that mean everything in it stands for something else? Then who are the Munchkins, and why the Wicked Witch of the West, and why is the road of yellow brick? They would have to stand for something besides themselves.

  The yellow brick road, well, that’s the way to the gold. The Wicked Witch, well, she’s the West, you see, meaning us, and with all those flying monkeys being her military forces, if you don’t do something she will be even worse than the phony Wizard. And I know who the Munchkins stand for. Believe me, I’m the authority on that.

  I’ll tell you about the party they gave us the night before we left.

  There was a party?

  Bill and Betty—to announce our engagement. It was a mostly Diminutive crowd. You know the way New York neighborhoods become Greek, Italian, Latino, the way Koreans run the convenience stores, the Muslims drive the taxis? So in the same way this town had its share of little people who made their living in show business. One elderly fellow sat in a chair and was deferred to by the others—he had actually been a Munchkin. Maybe the last of them alive. The liquor flowed, and the decibels were birdlike. Naturally the rug was rolled up and Bill and Betty did one of their vaudeville routines, the old soft shoe, a George M. Cohan number, “… for it was Mary, Mary, plain as any name can be …” And with such grace and ease, laughing as they accomplished this or that move, Bill at one point essaying some kind of double time step and Betty glancing to heaven. One of their friends had hoisted himself up onto the piano bench to accompany them and sing the lyrics in his mute tenor, and it was so fine, Briony and I the audience they played to, Briony sitting on the floor, beside me, her legs tucked under her, and her face luminous with joy. “But with propriety, society will say ‘Marie’ …” Others stepped up to do their signature routines, a mock lecture here, a poetry declamation there, all of it great fun, and I remember at one point the Diminutive pastor of the local church meeting me at the self-service bar and asking what I would do, if I were president, about the terrible turbulence in the world. I said I’d go to war to stop it, and it was against his better judgment but he laughed.

  Sounds as if you were having a good time.

  Well, I saw how Briony loved her parents’ routine, laughing and clapping for something she must have seen a hundred times. Watching her lifted me into a comparable state of happiness. As if it had arced brain to brain. This was a pure, unreflective, unselfconscious emotion. It had taken me by surprise and was almost too much to bear—happiness. I felt it as something expressed from my heart and squeezing out of my eyes. And I think as we all laughed and applauded at the end of the soft-shoe number I may have sobbed with joy. And I was made fearless in that feeling, it was not tainted by anxiety, I at that moment had no concern that I might trip and fall over one of them and squash him to death.

  So that cold clear emotionless pond of silence—

  I was rising from it to living and breathing, to great gasping breaths of life. Finding redemption in the loving attentions of this girl.

  Afterward, we excused ourselves and she led me to the dead end of the street. We climbed over the retaining wall where a path through the ground cover led down to the beach. We found ourselves alone on the beach, not in moonlight, there was no moon to be seen, but in the misty dim light of the cities to the north, the light pollution of Los Angeles spreading out over the sea. I had resisted going for a swim in daylight, not wanting to display my concave chest and skinny arms to the world. Briony had of course seen me in the nude, but one’s structure in a bedroom at night when the predominant light is one’s intellectual presence is not the vulnerable thing that a pale white professor of cognitive science, bony and slightly potbellied, conveys to the world on a public beach. But nothing could stop me now, we kicked off our shoes, dropped our clothes in the sand, and ran into the surf, which was warm and lapping. We swam together in the Pacific sea, and kissed of course, and I felt the smoothness of her, the tautness of her nipples in the briny sea, running my hand between her legs, holding her by the waist, kissing her as we clasped each other as we were rolled over and over together, cupped in the curl of the waves.

  When we came out I dried her with my shirt and we dressed and sat there on little thrones I built out of the sand. This was the time of peaceful reflection when I chose to satisfy my curiosity. I had seen on the wall of Bill’s study two framed naturalization certificates. Bill and Betty hadn’t been born here.

  Pop was born in Czechoslovakia, Briony said. That’s the Czech Republic now. Mom is Irish, from Limerick.

  Well, how did they meet?

  Ah, she laughed, then you’ve never heard of Leo Singer!

  At this, Briony jumped up and pulled me to my feet. She walked backward, holding my hands. And she told me about this man who went around Europe finding people like her mom and dad, hiring them and training them to work in his show, Leo Singer’s Lilliputians.

  Here Briony turned, ran ahead, and found it necessary to do a cartwheel. When she was back on her feet I said, What kind of a show?

  Well, Mom says the theme changed every season, and the costumes, but it was essentially vaudeville, with songs and sketches and routines like you saw tonight. Circus acts like jugglers, and wire walkers, people who could play the fiddle behind their back, everything you could think of. The attraction was their size, and how many things they could do anyway that people would come to see and marvel at.

  How animated she was telling me this family history—living it, almost, by punctuating her account with handstands, cartwheels, back flips to a standing position, running broad jumps. There on the beach that night to the rhythmic lapping of the surf.

  He toured them in all the European capitals and that was how Mom and Dad met. They were in the Leo Singer Lilliputstadt.

  So, Doc, did you ever hear of this man, Singer?

  No.

  That’s two of us. But it turns out he was the go-to guy when MGM needed Munchkins for their film. He was this international dealer in Munchkins.

>   I hear a note of disdain in your voice.

  Clearly an operator who infantilized these people, made a spectacle of them, and made himself a fortune in the process.

  Didn’t you say we all have an affection for what is miniature? And here they were in California, her parents, comfortably retired in their own home, a lovely family.

  I know, I know. What was in store for them from their villages if the guy hadn’t taken them away? Their parents probably only too relieved. I suppose money changed hands. Bill and Betty must have been young, in their teens or early twenties. And he gave them a profession, a means of self-respect, whereas back home they would have been forever misfits, tolerated, made fun of, or treated with insulting sympathy. But it all smacks of Europe, you know? This sensibility. At least the Munchkins in the film had a fictive identity, they weren’t midgets performing, they were these fantasy creatures made up not to look like themselves. Not Bill and Betty or the other Lilliputians. Don’t you think this has Europe written all over it?

  I’m not sure what you mean.

  I mean serfdom, indentured oppression, and all their damn uniforms and monarchal wars and colonizations and autos-da-fé. Baiting bears, that’s what I mean, the European culture of bearbaiting. Freak taunting. Jew killing. That’s what I mean.

  [thinking] She was so happy. So I didn’t say anything. Did I tell you I had bought her an engagement ring before we made the trip west?

  No.

  I did. I was doing all sorts of un-Andrew things. Holding hands in public, being happy. And now, on the beach, clowning around, trying to do my cartwheels, my handstands, and falling and getting up with a mask of sand on my face. How she laughed. And as it happens with new lovers, we were tinder. The passion fired up from anything—laughter, the keenness of the moment. Close your eyes, she said, and I felt her brushing the sand away. And then all at once she pushed me down, and as I lay back she was upon me, mouth on mouth, vehemently yanking my trousers down and then flipping us over so that I lay on top of her. When had she pulled up her shift to bare herself? And then the three little words: Put it in, she said. Put it in!