“More prrobably they are off no more fallyew than my Timeggs, howeffer.” Ernst said. I wished he hadn’t. I imagined the authorities would make a more serious effort to find pricey books than worthless ones.
“So what we have here is the theft of a watch worth a few bucks and some books which we don’t know their value. Any other items missing?”
“Nein.” said Ernst.
“Nine what?” said the cop.
“He means ‘No.’” Lissa explained.
“Oh. Well, that’s about it, then. You say they were wearing gloves, so there’s no point in looking for prints. We’ll let you know if anything turns up.”
Naively expecting promises of a swifter justice, I worked myself into a huff of moderate dimension: “‘That’s about it’? I just got robbed and physically assaulted, Lissa almost got raped with the barrel of a shotgun …”
The patrolman interrupted me as though he had heard similar irate rantings by victims of petty crime many times before, and he was sick of it. “There’s really nothing I can say.” he said in an astringent tone, “I’d love to camp on your doorstep tonight, but of course that’s impossible.”
“Of course.” I had to agree.
“We’ll be giving the house some extra patrol tonight. If they’re stupid enough to come back, we’re bound to catch them.”
More rote apologies on his side, some reserved thanks on ours, and he left. I continued to pace, weighted now not only by my traumatized genitalia but also by the dispiriting impression that the police had about as much time for, or interest in, recovering our petty property or in avenging an effete intellectual’s wounded testicles, as they had, say, in putting on a production of “Lady Windermere’s Fan” at the drama department’s Little Playhouse. If I wanted those books back, I was going to have to find them myself … and I did want them, I needed them. Beyond my usual bent toward danger, the acrophobe’s attraction to the precipice, I had two more practical reasons for hunting down my books. If they turned out to be worth anything, I could use the proceeds from their sale to get a place of my own, out from under Ma’s wide apron—as I say, any action is worth pursuing that promotes mental health. Also, on the previous night I had transformed a scrap of recycled newsprint almost alchemically into the key to my dissertation4 and had secreted it within one of the volumes. Recovering Doctor Syntax was my only hope of becoming a critic, a professor, a mensch.
FOUR
Enzo Impagliatore, my paternal grandfather, came to this country around the turn of the century, from a tiny farming village near Sorrento, on the Tyrrhenian coast at Italy’s mid-calf. His father had been a woodworker who barely managed to keep a wife and nine children alive with a cabinet here, a fence job there, some stonemasonry on the side, the occasional shed-framing. Of those nine my Nonno left Italy with the intention of saving enough cash in an old shoe to return one day to Italy and provide for the family. He booked passage on a freighter carrying seafood on ice: Calamari, Moscardini, Scugilli.5
Upon my grandfather’s arrival at Ellis island, the immigrations agent asked him the usual questions—name, occupation, childhood diseases—and my Nonno, fiercely proud of the English he had struggled to learn from a primer called Voci Inglesi, refused to converse in Italian. When asked for his name, my grandfather confused the English “name” for “occupation” and answered brightly, “I’m a hammerin’ nails.” referring to his carpentry trade. This reply the agent, no doubt with a healthy appreciation of the absurd and not a little contempt for wetbacks just off the boat, took to be my grandfather’s name: Harmon Nails.
My Nonno kept the new name, even wore it with pride, it being his first American possession. He stayed in New York, eventually built up a reasonably prosperous construction contracting firm, and had a son, Harmon “Bud” Nails, Jr., who became first a laundry delivery boy in the neighborhood of Richmond Hill, and later a well-to-do Los Angeles linen rental service mogul. In time, he passed the embarrassingly droll name down to his firstborn and only child, me, Harmon Nails III, dilettante grad student and boy sleuth.
In Neapolitan dialect there’s a term that embodies all the qualities considered necessary to get by—and ahead, if the breaks fall right—in a world of cutthroat material struggle. Scugnizzi refers to kids of eight and ten, barefoot wharf urchins who keep themselves fed by pilfering fish, lifting tourists’ cameras, a little light pandering, all the while frolicsome as otters, diving noisily off the long stone quay and roughhousing in the oily seawater, Vesuvio puffing picturesquely on the horizon. The scugnizz’ emblematize my paternal heritage, child-men with a sometimes ruthless but always sporting opportunism. By this quality my father’s family guided its own business affairs and therefore made a beautiful dollar, as my Nonno used to say.
In contrast, when my mother’s father died last year, he left practically nothing to his descendants, since he owned practically nothing. My Zaydeh had had all the success he hoped for in this country, escaping the persecution his forebears had suffered through decades of pogroms in his native Ukraine, and he made a good living for himself and his bride, working his way up to a small artificial flavoring factory in Atlanta, which break-even concern supported him, my grandmother, and their kids until his retirement and my grandmother’s death fifteen years ago.
That factory stands out as the highlight of my visits to Atlanta when I was little: the still, cold air, vaulted corrugated-tin ceilings, steel girders and druidic vats from which rose a thick tropical syrup-steam of strawberry, lime, banana, vanilla. To me at five, anyone who could fill the air with candy had to be God, and I adored Zaydeh. As I grew older, that feeling matured gradually (leapfrogging my bratty early teen years, of course) into a passionate admiration for his simple, honest strength. So, when I learned after his death last year that he had willed me a book called Doctor Syntax, I considered it no less than a treasure with which I would never consider parting.
Doctor Syntax turned out to be not one volume but three, which arrived one day by registered mail, and with them a short and clumsily typed letter of introduction from one Arnold Middenish, ].D., the obviously low-rent Georgia attorney who had supervised the distribution of my Zaydeh’s estate. To the note was stapled a Xeroxed copy of a document in my Zaydeh’s own hand, a fragment of a larger directive:
… at the end of the work day I am emptying a carton. In the bottom I find three books tied together with twine. I know a little Talmud, it says Finding Is Keeping applies only when there is no hope to find the owner. I took to work the books everyday and in the Kemfer placed a notice. No-one answered therefore by law I keep the books. A collector of things who married my wife’s dear friend Frieda’s cousin examined the books. He said the books were worth money and he offers fifty dollars. I turn down his offer because I have already an idea to pass the books on to my grandson who shows such promise as a man of learning. That is why to my daughter’s son, Harmon Nails III, who will be an honored professor of literature one day I will this set of books called Doctor Syntax by William Combe …
The story, underlining as it did both my grandfather’s firm righteousness and his belief in my success as an academician—a faith that was, up to this point, wholly unfounded—touched me deeply. Even though I had never heard of William Combe6 and didn’t care for the frivolous doggerel that filled the three volumes, the purely scugnizzaiol’ notion that I could sell a family heirloom for big money never would have entered my mind, had Mr. Middenish, J. D.’s note not also suggested that the volumes were rare, that they might now be worth thousands in the collectible book market, and that I should have them appraised for taxes. Call it the practicality of my paternal heritage winning out over sentimentality, or call it a hands-down victory for sheer crass greed; whatever you call it, I began to entertain serious retail fantasies of candy-apple sport sedans, tastefully pegged and pleated ice-cream slacks, years of sweet leisure occupied by nothing more academically demanding than an occasional glance at the New Yorker’s book review
section by the side of the pool.
But above all these speculations, one notion outshone and dimmed their combined thin light: My Own Place.
FIVE
It isn’t easy living with Ma. I occupy the guest house, which my father for years used as an office, and although the English garden7 between the studio and the main house affords me a certain physical autonomy, I am still, as far as Ma is concerned, under her roof—which, in her eyes, reinstates all her former maternal privileges. She can satisfy herself that I’m well fed and well rested, and she can nip at my heels like some monomaniacal sheepdog as I falteringly pursue academic excellence. But worst of all, my mother is a sexual assassin. I cannot with unmuddied conscience bring home a female friend, because there’s only one access to the guest house. Bordered on one side by a thick hedge of pittisporum and pomegranate and on the other by the white stucco main house, the path to the back is usually covered with a layer of leaves that crunch underfoot like cornflakes, is always well-lit at night by two glaring, burglar-foiling floodlights, and leads directly past the dining room window, the kitchen window, and the master bedroom French doors. I’m loath to lead a date down that walkway, because I always imagine Ma watching at one of those windows like a prison guard in the tower; her reproving presence—real or imagined—causes in me an overpowering weakening of appendage, which always spoils my loveplay before it gets started … which is exactly what happened the afternoon I brought Diane Droddy home with me, the evening I put the notes in Doctor Syntax.
Diane Droddy and I were enrolled in a phys-ed department folk-dance class—I, because I understood the ratio of women to men in such situations to be a favorable twelve or fifteen to one, and Diane because she was a dance major and needed some elective “movement” units to graduate. If you’ve never folk-danced, you should. It’s an invigorating and uncommonly intimate social situation in which you’re forced to perform the most humiliating physical movements while gripping and being gripped by total strangers. I mean, when you’re doing the Bulgarian walnut-stomping dance, and you’re embracing your partner in the traditional Bulgarian grapevine-armlock, there’s no way you and your partner can keep from laughing hysterically at your own awkwardness in accomplishing the unfamiliar posturings, and this lowering of inhibitions, combined with a natural, endorphin-induced euphoria that comes with vigorous exercise, breeds a glowing, breathless, presque-sexual kind of familiarity with your partner. So it was with Diane: After a few class sessions we found ourselves pairing up as frequently as possible and abandoning ourselves to lustful eye contact as we whip-spun around the gym in some Swedish polka.
On the way to our respective locker rooms one day, I called up all my Nails suave to ask Diane, “Do you want to do something sometime?”
She hesitated. “I don’t know.”
“It sounds like you don’t know.” Liz taught me well: When you’re nervous and can’t think of anything to say, restate the obvious.
“It sounds like that because it’s what I said.” Liz didn’t prepare me for Diane—a dancer and a literalist, too. I did what I have always done in unfamiliar situations, before Liz started modifying my behavior. I clammed up and waited.
It worked. Diane explained, “I think I have a boyfriend. He moved to Boston, for law school. We’ve been trying to keep it together, but he’s been pretty distant lately.”
I pressed subtly, “We don’t have to call it a date. We could just go to the beach or have lunch or something. Just spend some time together and talk or something.”
The idea that there could exist a male who might not pounce panting and salivating after a few minutes of preliminary chat usually seems novel and therefore irresistible to women. If the tales that battle-worn single women tell me are true, guys—even superficially civilized ones with shy smiles and empathic words—are at heart a collection of shallow, competitive, sloppy, and manipulative boors. Therefore, suggesting a tame daylit pastime I intuited to be a good opening, even if there lurked in an unevolved limbic lizardhole of my own psyche the instinct to pounce like the rest of the beasts.
In the case of Diane this reasoning proved sound. She reflected a moment, then said, “The beach sounds good. How about next Thursday? I have my last final from seven to ten. We can celebrate my graduation.”
“And my whole summer of freedom.”
I’ve also made the discovery that women feel more comfortable driving on dates, especially with men they don’t know well. So it was that Diane picked me up in front of my house, where I sat, on the bottom step of the long brick walkway that passed through the rose garden, down the ivy-covered hill, to the entrance at the street.
Diane got out of her car. Pointing in the direction of the house she said, “This is such a nice place. Do you share it?”
“I live in the studio in back.”
“Rent must be terrible around here. I didn’t think T.A.s made that kind of money.”
Wanting to avoid at all costs any admission of my continuing dependent connection with Mommie, since it might diminish Diane’s impression of me as a manly, self-reliant guy, I omitted the kernel of truth. She got bran: “The rent’s really not that bad. I do some work around the place. Gardening, take out the trash, you know.”
Diane swallowed this roughage. She opened the passenger door for me and said, “Let’s go. I want to get a parking space before it gets too crowded.”
She had on a white cotton beach shift, sleeveless, with a short hemline that gave way to cappuccino-tanned and dance-sculpted legs. These she tucked back into her ’67 Karmann-Ghia. Ragtop down, Beverly Hills casual chic with me in my Hawaiian print shirt, tennis visor and Fiorini shades, we drove to Will Rogers beach, just down the hill from my house at the top of Santa Monica canyon.
On the way Diane described her current effort in modern dance, a student adaptation of a nineteenth-century tragedy by an obscure Czech expressionist named Vaclav Kleptar. In the original play a young female student gets seduced by her mathematics professor, winds up pregnant, has the baby, is ostracized by the community, and flings herself despondently into the half-frozen Danube. The baby, raised by abusive foster parents, grows up to be a notorious thief. While robbing a small general store, he kills an innocent bystander, who turns out to be the very same math professor, his father. He’s arrested. The prosecutor brings out the real identity of his victim at the trial. Our thief uses his belt to hang himself in his cell.
Kleptar no doubt intended the play to be an indictment of the growing scientism of the age, the tyranny of geometry over innocent wonder, the compass over the conundrum. But Diane’s colleagues wanted to avoid any such heavy-handed symbolism and instead saw the story as a simple tragic story of love and betrayal, relevant today as the original play was in Kleptar’s time. It also had its racy moments. “In the central, climatic8 piece, which we call the Podium Dance, the stage goes all black. Then a single spot falls on a teacher’s podium rising up out of a trapdoor in the stage.
“You don’t call that heavy-handed? Freud would cream in his jeans if he were alive and wearing jeans and watching your recital.”
“I just dance, all right?”
“Sorry.”
“So five of us, all in skintight body stockings and white hoods, do a kind of fertility ritual around this podium. We whip it with nylon cords, we rub ourselves up against it as it rises to full height in the center of the stage. Then the spot starts to strobe on and off, faster and faster, and then the stage goes dark again.”
The image of the blatantly phallic lectern being stroked, frottaged, lashed to a tropical climate by seminude dancers in a disciplinary frenzy was too much for me. I put my visor in my lap, which it rode like an empronged quoit. Diane laughed. “I see you can relate to the scenario. As a teacher” she commented.
“Well, uh, yes, the lectern obviously represents the whole of the teaching profession, I suppose, while the strobing light, presumably the jism of intellectual truth, illuminates but at the sa
me time enslaves a submissive student body, trapping them like specks of dust dancing in its whiteness …”
“We’re there.”
“What?”
“At the beach.”
“Ah. The beach.”
Diane gunned the Ghia impatiently around the lines of cars, looking for a space, which gave me time to calm myself. A family in a station wagon eased out of a slot. Diane pulled in.
We found a space on the sand at a reasonable distance from any clots of squalling kids or leering, haw-hawing teenage beer drinkers, and there we spread our blanket—actually my mother’s old red-and-white-checkered cloth that used to cover the patio table when, of summers, my father would barbecue burgers and corn in tinfoil. I let the wind catch the material like a spinnaker and set it down gently. The thought of my mother annoyed me like a fat horsefly. I didn’t want anything to remind me of her now, not even her tablecloth. I looked around to dispel the delusion Ma was here, smeared with sunblock and watching our every move. I didn’t see her, although there was one striped umbrella tilted in such a way that I couldn’t see the party behind it. I shooed away the buzzing fly.
While I was going through this familiar psychotic routine, Diane had taken off her beach dress and stretched out in a metallic blue one-piece, cut high at the hips. I joined her on the cloth. We lay quietly, making occasional jokes about students in our dance class. We ate oranges under the hot sun and then went in the water, where there wasn’t much surf but the water was cool and we rode some gentle waves into the shore together, rolling and splashing as we washed up on the wet sand. We went back to the blanket and lay down on our bellies, wet and breathing hard from the exertion. Pressure from the seawater in my semicircular canals made a high-tension whine, as from a swarm of midges. Diane turned onto her side, facing me, and said, “You have the nicest ears.”
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