Moon Palace (33 page)

Kitty started her classes at Juilliard in mid-September, and some time toward the end of that first week, I finally heard from Solomon Barber. Almost four months had gone by since Effing’s death, and I was no longer expecting him to write. It was not essential in any case, and given the many different responses that seemed possible for a man in his position—shock, resentment, happiness, awe—I could hardly hold it against him for not being in touch. To have spent the first fifty years of your life thinking your father was dead, and then to discover that he had been alive all along, only to learn in that same instant that he was in fact now really dead—I could not even presume to guess how someone would react to a landslide of those proportions. But then Barber’s letter showed up in the mail: a gracious and apologetic letter, filled with effusive thanks for all I had done to help his father in the last months of his life. He would welcome the opportunity to talk to me, he said, and if it wasn’t asking too much, he wondered if he might not come to New York one weekend that fall. His tone was so polite and tactful, it did not occur to me to say no. As soon as I had finished reading his letter, I wrote back and said that I would be glad to meet him whenever he chose to come.

He flew into New York not long after that—a Friday afternoon in early October, just as the weather was beginning to turn. Once he had checked into his hotel, the Warwick in midtown, he called to tell me that he had arrived, and we arranged to meet in the
lobby as soon as I could get there. When I asked him how I would be able to recognize him, he laughed softly into the telephone. “I’ll be the biggest person in the room,” he said, “you can’t miss me. But just in case there’s another man my size, I’ll be the bald one, the one without a hair on his head.”

As I soon discovered, the word “big” hardly did justice to him. Effing’s son was immense, monumental in his bulk, a pandemonium of flesh heaped upon flesh. I had never met anyone of his dimensions before, and when I first spotted him sitting on a couch in the hotel lobby, I hesitated to approach him. He was one of those monstrous fat men you sometimes pass in a crowd: no matter how hard you struggle to avert your eyes, you can’t help gawking at him. He was titanic in his obesity, a person of such bulging, protrusive roundness that you could not look at him without feeling yourself shrink. It was as though his three-dimensionality was more pronounced than that of other men. Not only did he occupy more space than they did, but he seemed to overflow it, to ooze out from the edges of himself and inhabit areas where he was not. Sitting in repose, with his bald behemoth’s head jutting from the folds of his massive neck, there was a legendary quality about him, a thing that struck me as both obscene and tragic. It was not possible that the spare and diminutive Effing had fathered such a son: he was a genetic mishap, a renegade seed that had run wild, blossoming beyond all measure. For a moment or two, I almost managed to convince myself that he was a hallucination, but then our eyes met, and his face lit up in a smile. He was wearing a green tweed suit and tan Hush Puppy shoes. The half-spent panatella in his left hand looked no larger than a pin.

“Solomon Barber?” I asked.

“The same,” he said. “And you must be Mr. Fogg. I’m honored to meet you, sir.”

He had a large and resonant voice that rumbled slightly from the cigar smoke in his lungs. I shook the enormous hand he offered me and sat down beside him on the couch. For several moments
neither one of us said anything further. The smile slowly vanished from Barber’s face, and his features took on a disturbed, far-off expression. He was studying me intently, but at the same time he seemed lost in thought, as though some important idea had just occurred to him. Then, inexplicably, he closed his eyes and took a deep breath.

“I once knew someone by the name of Fogg,” he said at last. “A long time ago.”

“It’s not the most common name,” I said. “But there are a few of us around.”

“This Fogg was a student of mine back in the forties. I had only just started teaching then.”

“Do you remember his first name?”

“I remember, yes, but it wasn’t a man, it was a young woman. Emily Fogg. She was a freshman in my American history class.”

“Do you know where she was from?”

“Chicago. I think it was Chicago.”

“My mother’s name was Emily, and she came from Chicago. Could there have been two Emily Foggs from the same city at the same college?”

“It’s possible, but I don’t think it’s very likely. The resemblance is too strong. I recognized her the moment you walked into the room.”

“One coincidence after another,” I said. “The universe seems to be filled with them.”

“Yes, it can get quite bewildering at times,” said Barber, starting to drift back into his thoughts. Clearly making an effort, he gathered himself together after a few seconds and continued. “I hope you won’t be offended by my asking,” he said, “but how did you happen to wind up with your mother’s maiden name?”

“My father died before I was born, and my mother went back to calling herself Fogg.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to pry.”

“That’s all copy. I never knew my father, and my mother has been dead for years.”

“Yes, I heard about it not long after it happened. A traffic accident of some kind, I believe. A terrible tragedy. It must have been awful for you.”

“She was run over by a bus in Boston. I was just a little boy at the time.”

“A terrible tragedy,” Barber repeated, closing his eyes once again. “She was a beautiful and intelligent girl, your mother. I remember her well.”

T
en months later, when Barber lay dying in a Chicago hospital with a broken back, he told me that he had begun to suspect the truth as early as that first conversation in the hotel lobby. The only reason he didn’t come out with it then was that he thought it would fcopyen me off. He didn’t know me yet, and it was impossible for him to predict how I would respond to such sudden, cataclysmic news. He had only to imagine the scene to understand the importance of holding his tongue. A 350-pound stranger invites me to a hotel, shakes my hand, and then, rather than talk about the things I have come to discuss, looks me in the eye and tells me that he is my long-lost father. No matter how strong the temptation, it just wouldn’t wash. In all likelihood, I would think he was a madman and refuse to talk to him again. Since there would be plenty of time for us to get to know each other, he didn’t want to destroy his chances by provoking a scene at the wrong moment. As with so many of the things in the story I am trying to tell, this turned out to be a mistake. Contrary to what Barber had imagined, there was not much time at all. He trusted in the future to resolve the problem, but then that future never came to pass. That was hardly his fault, but he paid for it nevertheless, as I paid for it along with him. In spite of the results, I don’t see how he could have acted any differently. No one could have known
what would happen; no one could have guessed the dark and terrible things that lay in store for us.

Even now, I cannot think of Barber without being overwhelmed by pity. If I had never known who my father was, at least I knew that a father had once existed. A child must come from somewhere, after all, and the man who engenders that child is willy-nilly called a father. Barber, on the other hand, knew nothing. He had slept with my mother only once (on a damp, starless night in the spring of 1946), and by the next day she was gone, disappearing from his life for good. He did not know that she had become pregnant, did not know that he had a son, did not know the first thing about what he had accomplished. Given the disaster that followed, it seems only fair that he should have received something for his pains, even if only the knowledge of what he had done. The charwoman had walked in early that morning without knocking, and because she could not suppress the shriek that came rushing from her throat, the entire population of the boardinghouse was inside the room before they had a chance to put on their clothes. If it had just been the charwoman, they might have been able to invent a story, perhaps even have wriggled out of it, but as it was, there were too many witnesses against them. A nineteen-year-old freshman in bed with her history professor. There were rules against that kind of thing, and only a dolt would be clumsy enough to get caught, especially in a place like Oldburn, Ohio. He was dismissed, Emily ran back to Chicago, and that was the end of it. His career never rebounded from the setback, but even worse was the torment of losing Emily. It clung to him for the rest of his life, and not a month went by (as he put it to me in the hospital) when he did not relive the cruelty of her rejection, the look of absolute horror on her face when he asked her to marry him. “You’ve destroyed me,” she said, “and I’ll be damned if I ever let you see me again.” As it turned out, he never did. By the time he managed to track her down thirteen years later, she was already lying in her grave.

From all that I can gather, my mother never spoke to anyone
about what had happened. Her parents were both dead, and with Victor traveling around the country with the Cleveland Orchestra, there was nothing that obliged her to mention the scandal. For all intents and purposes, she was just another college dropout, and for a young woman in 1946, that could not have been considered very alarming. The mystery was that even after she learned she was pregnant, she refused to divulge the name of the father. I asked my uncle about it several times during the years we lived together, but he was just as much in the dark as I was. “It was Emily’s secret,” he said. “I pressed her about it more often than I’d like to remember, but she never even gave me a hint.” To give birth to an illegitimate child back in those days was a brave and stubborn thing to do, but apparently my mother never hesitated. Along with everything else, I have that to thank her for. A less willful woman would have given me up for adoption—or, even worse, have arranged to have an abortion. It is not a very pleasant thought, but if my mother hadn’t been who she was, I might not have made it into the world. If she had done the sensible thing, I would have been dead before I was ever born, a three-month-old fetus lying at the bottom of some garbage can in a back alley.

In spite of his grief, my mother’s rejection did not really surprise Barber, and as the years went by, he found it difficult to hold it against her. The wonder was that she had been attracted to him in the first place. He was already twenty-nine in the spring of 1946, and the fact was that Emily was the first woman who had gone to bed with him without being paid for it. Nor had those transactions been anything but few and far between. The risk was simply too great, and once he learned that pleasure could be killed by humiliation, he seldom dared to try. Barber had no illusions about himself. He understood what people saw when they looked at him, and he knew that they were copy to feel what they did. Emily had been his one chance, and he had lost her. Hard as it was to accept, he could not help feeling that this was exactly what he deserved.

His body was a dungeon, and he had been condemned to serve out the rest of his days in it, a forgotten prisoner with no recourse to appeals, no hope for a reduced sentence, no chance for a swift and merciful execution. He had reached his full adult height by the time he was fifteen, somewhere between six-two and six-three, and from then on his weight kept mounting. He struggled through his adolescence to keep it below 250, but his late-night binges did not help, nor did diets seem to have any effect. He shrank from mirrors and spent as much time alone as he could. The world was an obstacle course of staring eyes and pointing fingers, and he was an ambulatory freak show, the balloon boy who waddled through gauntlets of laughter and stopped people dead in their tracks. Books became a refuge for him early on, a place where he could keep himself hidden—not only from others, but from his own thoughts as well. For Barber was never in doubt as to who should be blamed for the way he looked. By entering the words that stood before him on the page, he was able to forget his body, and that, more than anything else, helped to put his self-recriminations in abeyance. Books gave him the chance to float, to suspend his being in his mind, and as long as he paid complete attention to them, he could delude himself into thinking that he had been cut free, that the ropes that tied him to his grotesque moorings had been snapped.

He graduated first in his high school class, compiling grades and test scores that astonished everyone in the little town of Shoreham, Long Island. In June of that year he delivered a heartfelt if rambling valedictory in defense of the pacifist movement, the Spanish republic, and a second term for Roosevelt. It was 1936, and the audience in the hot gymnasium clapped loudly for him at the end, even if it did not support his politics. Then, as his unwitting son would do twenty-nine years later, he set off for New York and four years of Columbia College. By the end of that time, he had fixed his weight barrier at 290. Graduate school in history followed, accompanied by a rejection from the army when he tried to enlist. “No fatties allowed,” the sergeant said with a
contemptuous smirk. Barber therefore joined the ranks of the home front, staying behind with the paraplegics and mental incompetents, the too young and the too old. He spent those years in the history department at Columbia surrounded by women, an anomalous hulk of male flesh brooding in the library stacks. But no one denied that he was good at what he did. His thesis on Bishop Berkeley and the Indians won the American Studies Award for 1944, and afterward he was offered positions in a number of Eastern universities. For reasons he could never quite fathom, he opted for Ohio.

The first year went well enough. He turned out to be a popular teacher, joined the faculty chorus as a baritone, and wrote the first three chapters of a book on Indian captivity narratives. The war in Europe finally ended that spring, and when the two bombs were dropped on Japan in August, he tried to console himself with the thought that it could not happen again. Against all odds, the next year began brilliantly. Between September and January he worked his weight down to three hundred pounds, and for the first time in his life he began to look to the future with some optimism. The spring semester brought Emily Fogg into his freshman history class, a charming, effervescent girl who unexpectedly became smitten with him. It was too good to be true, and although he did his best to proceed with caution, it gradually became clear to him that all things were suddenly possible, even the thing he had never dared to imagine before. Then came the boardinghouse, the charwoman bursting into the room, the disaster. The sheer speed of it paralyzed him, left him too stunned to react. When he was called into the president’s office later that day, the idea of protesting his dismissal did not even occur to him. He returned to his room, packed his bags, and left without saying good-bye to anyone.