New Moon (15 page)

“How could you scare me like that?” Mommy shrieked.

“Do you know what you’re doing to your mother?” Daddy added, turning his back and walking away. “You’re killing her.”

I was the Prince of Darkness in that household, a representative
of a hostile foreign country. “The devil,” Jonny said in retrospect after we were both grown up. “You were the devil. Everything you did was wrong because you were, like, from hell. All your friends were demons or thieves. You were crazy because you had to go to that doctor all the time. Only it wasn’t a real doctor; it was like learning to be more evil. You were always undermining Mom and Dad’s authority, explaining why they really did things. You had a way to get at them because you knew all this stuff from the outside. And you had this other family of rich bad guys.”

The third time I went to Grossinger’s, during Easter vacation, I was sent with Gail, Daddy’s oldest niece, plus a kid my age also named Richard, the son of one of my mother’s friends.

Uncle Paul and Aunt Bunny were travelling in the Caribbean with Michael and James, yet my mother wanted me to go partly because they
weren’t
there but also because she had promised a free trip to Grossinger’s to the parents of both my alleged companions. When I balked, she rebuked me with “Would you deprive your cousin of a chance to find a husband?”

Upon arrival Gail got a social calendar and went off looking for men, so I was left alone with Richard, one of the worst kids I had ever met. He had a “torture kit,” as he called it, a tiny leather pouch of pins and blades. He would regularly threaten to “punish” me if I did not show him the proper deference. Actually, except for the occasional stab of a pin, he resorted to his full array of tools only once, when I was beating him in Monopoly. Suddenly he reached across the board and grabbed my $500s, $100s, and property cards.

When I protested, he took out the kit, unzipped it, and began scratching my arm, muttering in a theatrically sinister voice, “You want to argue with me knife?” I called for help, but Gail, who was reading a magazine, told us to settle it ourselves. Then he twisted my arm behind my back until I agreed, in increasing agony, that he had won fair and square. That was the last time I let my mother cast my trips to Grossinger’s.

As for Richard, I knew only that his mother died from cancer a few years later after giving birth to a girl, an event that sent
my
mother into a tailspin of panics. I forgot about them until thirty years later when a college acquaintance became the piano teacher of Richard’s grown-up little sister and discovered that her brother had once been my “friend.” “Not quite,” I wrote to him, explaining why Richard was not a fond childhood memory.

“Your letter gave me the chills,” he responded. “Do you know what became of your tormentor? He’s now in the upper echelon of counterintelligence for the Army. Obviously, he started young!”

During the spring of fourth grade Phil and I began reading Hardy Boys mysteries together. The series began with hidden loot of
The Tower Treasure
, a first edition of which I found covered with dust in Aunt Marian’s library at the Nevele like a collector’s cherished stamp. “It’s yours now,” she declared. It ended thirty-four volumes later with
The Hooded Hawk Mystery
in which the two teen detectives use a tamed bird to break a crime ring.

Each Hardy Boys cover was a panel of mystery, a portal that dissolved into the landscape of Bayport with a cliff-hanger, the rustic scenery as compelling as the plot. There was something simultaneously old-fashioned and modern, dreamlike and real about the stories: covert houses, hidden chests, underwater rocks, abandoned islands, smuggling rings, racehorse kidnappers.

When we got through all of the available Hardy Boys to date we moved on to Rick Brant, Tom Swift, Tom Quest, Ken Holt, even Nancy Drew—other young sleuths brooking mysterious landscapes.

When a perspicacious lad (or girl) discovered an unused bus ticket, a piece of suspicious cargo, a trinket, a tribal mask, or a torn map, it was both a marker and rune, the start of a suspenseful chain that led to haunted bridges, leaning chimneys, boats buried among bushes, amulets of grinning tigers, and humming gypsy dolls (that weren’t dolls). I would save my money and wait outside the bookstore across Madison from P.S. 6 for the silver-haired lady to appear around the corner five minutes before the school bell—like a comet she showed up at that precise time every day. After she unlocked the
door, I followed her into the papyrus-scented alcove, picked the next volume from its shelf, gave her my dollar, and ran to class.

Phil and I sank so deeply into the genre that we began writing and illustrating our own versions combining characters from different series. Phil dreamed up one ingenious plot in which Rick Brant, Ken Holt, Tom Swift, and the others got recruited into the same case but were unwittingly helping the crooks. Event after event was scribbled on our yellow pads, an occasional full-page illustration with a caption like “They had vanished without a trace.”

Then the two of us went searching for clues at lunchtime. On one such occasion we found a silver watch on a chain with a small plastic skull attached to it on the street—a remarkable object under the circumstances—and, by deduction, attributed it to a nearby apartment building where we tried to decode the engraving on the watch by matching it to names of tenants on mailboxes. It would have worked for Frank and Joe Hardy, but it didn’t for us. We must have gotten in too deep because a policeman arrived at the lobby, listened to our tale, and told us that we could collect the watch from the City lost-and-found if no one claimed it within a month.

Riddles and clues were my forte, whether in detective novels, puzzle books, or
Interpretation of Dreams.
My case with Dr. Fabian was the best and most suspenseful mystery of all, for he was searching for the clue that would unlock the secret of me. I knew by then that he was a highly regarded psychiatrist with famous patients and that he considered me a first-rate enigma. In fact, I came to see myself as his toughest challenge ever because the dungeon stairs felt as indecipherable and unfathomable to him as they did to me. I was the equivalent of a secret panel or flashing lighthouse and we were hundreds of pages in without a verdict in sight.

My trails of clues were more furtive and baffling than those followed by the Hardy Boys, for they led
inside
the world. I imagined their “source” as being like a pot of gold in a fairy tale: a cache of symbolic coins from the early days of Nanny, a rebus-like glass of apple juice at sunset, a primal egg in a bush, or something forgotten long ago. Since I had no idea what clues Dr. Fabian needed
I volunteered as much as I could. I rattled off my weekly tales, updating him on my mother, P.S. 6, Bill-Dave, Grossinger’s, while providing strings of hopeful symbols and Hardy Boys–like traces and tips, from vagrant shapes on ceilings and brick walls to patterns seen in bubbles of urine while peeing. Detective novels had shown me how subtle and indirect an indication might be.

I could not see through my own veils to any sort of clarity or resolution, no hint of a shape or even a promising shadow. So I kept delivering fresh intelligence. I hoped that Dr. Fabian, with his greater powers of discernment, was on the case and making progress, that one day he would leap from behind his desk like a scientist in a comic book and shout “Eureka! I’ve got it.” Then my mystery would be solved and I would be reconciled and happy.

My life became a story I told—a more primitive version of the one I am telling now. The members of my family were its characters. I was the main character (as well as the narrator): a troubled boy talking to a wise doctor.

My fears were invoked so regularly they became characters too, invariable abstractions with personalities. “I’m afraid of being poisoned,” I said. “I’m afraid of being kidnapped. I’m afraid of getting cancer.” I played along but I was fatalistic. That any of these could be cured by a medicine made of words seemed ridiculous, for I continued to sense how trenchantly my symptoms were rooted. What abracadabra would rip them out, what elixir dissolve them?

My splurges of thoroughness and candor changed nothing. I wet my bed just as much. I still had impromptu panics, bottomless in their scope and range of representation. I didn’t keen or do jigs in the hall anymore, though I felt the same stampede of desperation.

It was better if Mommy and Daddy
didn’t
know; they only made uninformed and exasperated comments or, even worse, blamed Dr. Fabian for his incompetence. I carried my terror silently like a gremlin I dare not disclose. Sometimes I curled up around it on my bed, girdling and containing its throb with my whole being.

More profound than any of the threats, I experienced a lesion, a place with no content at all.

“You are afraid that something terrible is going to happen to you!” Dr. Fabian finally declared. That was his firm professional conclusion. He announced it one day triumphantly like the long-awaited eureka. Then he repeated the refrain so many times over the years that it became like a proverb or maxim, the lyrics to a tuneless song. Its oracular ring held the gist and upshot of my whole situation, almost biblical in tenor, but what did it actually mean?

Not long after his revelation our quest took an unexpected turn. At the start of a session Dr. Fabian gave me a rare treat: a vanilla ice-cream cup. I was digging at the hard cream with the flat wooden spoon when I suddenly worried that the black specks were poison. It seemed ridiculous to have such a confusion, let alone in his presence. I knew that vanilla made black specks in ice cream, but I couldn’t stem my surge of terror.

Pleased with the opportunity to work on a panic directly, Dr. Fabian tried in vain to get inside my thinking. Then he suggested we do free connection on the specks. Okay: “seed,” “tree,” “apple,” “orchid,” “baby,” aha! He surmised that I was worried about eating seeds and getting pregnant. Folllowing his hunch, he drew detailed diagrams on a sheet of paper, explaining the process of conception—the role of the penis and the vagina, the fertilization and growth of the egg. This was to establish that boys were in no danger of being inseminated by specks in ice cream.

I listened dutifully, but I had already heard this stuff from kids at school. Dr. Fabian may have been satisfied that he had solved the mystery of the ice-cream cup, but I knew better. I preferred to play dumb, not acknowledge the error even to myself. I needed him to be perfect. After all, I relied on him for proof of who I was. If he didn’t know what was going on, I was in big trouble indeed, alone with stuff like dismemberment of my body and the dungeon stairs—a kid in a canoe without a paddle, headed for Niagara Falls.

We could only get so far with “You afraid that something terrible is going to happen to you” because, however weighty and portentous it sounded when he intoned it, all it added to the fears was a mysterious hovering specter. Then a few months later, Dr. Fabian solved that guise too, settling on a surprisingly tame origin for such an
elemental augur: the terrible thing had already happened—it was the divorce of my parents.

That didn’t seem sufficient either, nowhere near the gravitas I felt, but he was so convinced that he pushed it with all his authority. Since I trusted him, I became reconciled to my parents’ divorce as the main culprit in a “crime” committed hundreds of pages back that gave rise to all my twists of plot. It was apparently formidable enough to launch full-blown panics, for it bound a mysterious intrinsic power belying its relative blandness. To my mind a divorce was paltry and overt, cherry-pie by comparison to a “coiled cobra,” “crisscross shadow,” or “sinister signpost.” Plus, by Dr. Fabian’s logic, its deposition should have caused my fears and bedwetting to stop.

They didn’t. Nothing changed.

Dr. Fabian never got past this signature revelation. Once framed, he made it our singular philosophy and sovereign agenda. He applied it not only to bed-wetting and panics but to dreams and relationships, and he always made it fit. Session by session as I continued to tell my story, he found ways to reshape it along the authorized line—that my troubles arose from a Martha-Paul sundering that split not only my family but my identity.

I abided by Dr. Fabian’s verdict for years, spouting his mythology to Aunt Bunny and anyone else worthy of hearing. Only later did I realize how slack his interpretation, how random its applications. He was oddly making the same mistake that Phil and I had with our watch and skull!

There was nothing in my root feeling that came close to validating this explanation. What about semblances at the window? What about dungeon stairs? They couldn’t be reduced to a mere maxim. What about atom bombs? What about death itself? Where did they fit into the divorce? How could any of this be made normal, okay—ever?

But then who was I to argue with the master of symbols and dreams?

Meanwhile I withheld from him my real secrets (as I withheld from myself that I was withholding them): ungenerous emotions toward friends and family, erotic episodes during interplanetary
daydreams, frustration with his solutions, irritation that he showed up with his wife at Grossinger’s for Christmas and joined Aunt Bunny and Uncle Paul for drinks by the fireplace. I
didn’t want to be angered by that
—it was a celebratory affair merging my two most important worlds—but I was, and I didn’t want to discuss it when he brought it up, wondering if it bothered me seeing him there. “No,” I replied cheerfully, “I wasn’t upset.” But I had not liked seeing him a regular man in conversation with adults. I did not want him to have an ordinary-looking wife. I did not appreciate his putting the Hotel’s largesse ahead of me, taking advantage of his position as my doctor. I didn’t tell him any of this because I thought it was ungenerous and petty of me. I didn’t want to be a run-of-the-mill Towers-family grouch.

We each missed the crux of my case. I was portraying only a part of Richard and in a way that was comfortable—self-flattering. Having made myself Dr. Fabian’s star pupil, I could not abandon the aggrandized role or my gallant martyrdom. He went along with the charade; yet he was marking time, probably waiting for me to mature and provide a hook or gem he could recognize.

I never told him that while I was free-associating specks in my ice cream, I was lying. My
real
first connection was that he was trying to poison me with the vanilla cup. Like an evil magician, he had been saving a black powder for years. He had sprinkled it in the ice cream, made it look undisturbed, then fit the top back on as if it had not been tampered with. That’s why the specks in the creamy white changed context in his presence, intimating something
that vanilla never had before.
I knew that the fear was irrational, that I wasn’t really afraid, but
I was unable to stop scaring myself.
Once I had dug in with my spoon, I found it impossible to remember whether the surface had been perfectly smooth or ruffled.

I couldn’t tell him any of that, yet it was
exactly what he needed to know and what I needed him to know.
I never considered confessing. His job was to make me a hero, his protégé, not a suspicious, ungrateful wretch. So we ended up with how babies are made instead of my fury at him or guilt for that anger, for suspecting such a turncoat deed from my benefactor and friend. We were
staring at an obsessive-compulsive loop and missed it.

It never occurred to me that I would rather hold onto my secrets and fantasies than shatter their reverie. Nor did I let myself suspect, while I led him on a merry chase all those years, that Dr. Fabian himself was baffled by the increasing intricacy of my associations. I had figured out his game pretty well by then and perfected my resistance. While I dutifully provided ever more complex and bizarre material—after all, I was a reader of both Freud and the Hardy Boys—he kept searching for some classic etiology, finally settling on the divorce, out of either frustration or desperation.

I didn’t think to look out for him; I figured he was smart enough to look out for himself.

It never occurred to him that to tell a child, “You are afraid that something terrible is going to happen to you” is tantamount to saying
something terrible is going to happen to you
—that to make a pathological mother a piñata of clues, an oracle needing deciphering, was to inflate and empower her above mortal ken, the last thing his young charge needed. And to produce a vanilla ice-cream cup out of the blue was to suggest seduction, an inappropriate adult interest.

A better strategy would have been to produce gloves and a ball and propose having a catch in the neighborhood park. The unfraught camaraderie of a toss, acknowledging my baseball skills while setting us at a neutral distance, would have been ideal and more beneficial than our psychoanalytic burlesque—except that’s what we
did,
the best part of it. His sheer presence across the table, the origami boats and balls, his authentic interest in my life, his unconditional love for me were the therapeutic equivalent of having a weekly catch with Gil McDougald. It was more salutary than all his symbols and interpretations put together.