New Moon (16 page)

The ice-cream cup was a mistake only in that he lost track of where we were: my fear of poisons, my need to know where everything came from, his own unconscious ambivalences, about his feelings for a child, about crossing a professional line with a treat. He couldn’t help but serve all that with the vanilla, so I got it unconsciously too. Together we projected enough onto that cup to convert its specks from purity to danger. The ice cream became
like the Cropsey’s orange at Chipinaw. Billy Cabot tricked me into eating it by pulling it from a bag and pretending it was a different one, before claiming that he picked it from the woods. Dr. Fabian wasn’t pretending, but he didn’t realize how horrible it was to think I ate the Cropey’s fruit, how long it stayed with me even though I didn’t believe that the cut-up maniac was real.

At rare moments I was able to get across, if barely, that there was something else, something bigger and different. I was afraid—really and truly and irreconcilably afraid, and enchanted too, even redeemed—in an ambiguous way he didn’t understand. He thought that I was describing affect rather than core—he didn’t understand how I could follow the Yankees or enjoy Grossinger’s so much and be torn apart by terror. He didn’t perceive how dichotomy and ambivalence were generic to my wound, how obsessive compulsion was my mirror—so I settled for narrations from Grossinger’s lobbies, Towers family spats, and hoopla at Chipinaw and Bill-Dave.

I
was
afraid of something terrible, and it
had
already happened, but it wasn’t my parents’ divorce. It was more like starry night or cavemen contemplating snow and wind with no hope of obviation or succor, without knowledge of what
it
was or who
they
were. Pulsations of panic evoked the Crusades, the Nazi death camps—an irreparable breach between fantasy and reality, a sphinx without gods or language.

Sometimes the haunting in me softened into sadness, a sense of being lost and forlorn (like Heidi’s grandfather searching frantically for her through wintry villages). It was more than a sadness. It was a shadowing of limitless depth, of layers parting to reveal other layers themselves parting like the leaves of maples in a breeze, like the rich, intoxicating solitude of autumn. In this form sadness was not only not sorrow; it was paradoxically the most joyful thing I knew. Not joyful like Grossinger’s but joyful like absurd reparation, like abject terror suddenly and inexplicably turning into bliss. I never understood the seesaw between those two halves of me: was I fortune’s most irrepressibly charmed kid who got to go to Grossinger’s and play with Boy or the world’s loneliest, most doomed pariah, the devil incarnate, sentenced to perdition forever? How could I be both? It
was like “Did the Yankees win or lose?” but to the zillionth power.

The songs of the play
Finian’s Rainbow
(as performed by the older kids at Chipinaw) bore shards of the elusive dichotomy. I tried singing but couldn’t keep a tune. Upon request (and with a little help from me on the lyrics) Bridey reproduced them in her brogue:
“How are things in Glocca Morra … / Does that leapin’ brook still…. ”
Words and melody put their spell over me; the world itself seemed to drop a chord into slow motion and swim by in solemn, stately fashion. Yes, it was sad and fearful, but it was beautiful—shockingly, unprecedentedly beautiful. Then she sang,
“Look, look, look to the rainbow…. ”
I had no words to match it, but I leaned into the song like a sunflower into sun.

Jonny and I would run along the Nevele solarium, building little piles of snow on the railings in an effort to thaw some of the winter away in March while Debby splattered in her red rubber boots among puddles at our feet. Mommy sat on a lawn chair, her eyes closed, a silver reflector about her neck capturing the nearest star. Clump after clump of puffy cold was placed on rusty ledges as Jon and I called to each other to check the progress of the melting at either end. This industriousness would arouse a sense of the profoundest well-being in me. I’d be thinking about where I was in my latest science-fiction book and how later I’d lie toasty by the radiator and read it—then we’d eat dinner; afterwards, we’d have a plate of chocolate horseshoe cookies … and suddenly the song would seep through my existence:
“Follow it over the hi-ill and stream…. ”
I twisted the vowels in “follow” and “hill” and “stream” until they were barely English in the back of my mouth. There was a tenuous point, before they became garble, at which they held the whole mystery, the fairy tale, Bridey’s Ireland.

It was a book I read, maybe; a dream I had; or it was something else entirely, vast and incomprehensible. All the time, this mood dogged me, conveying feints and masks—and also that strangely immense joy
(“… so I ask each weeping willow, / and each brook along the way …”).
Jon and I would buy candy bars and comics at Ivy’s Store, go pinball bowling, and then sit in the lobby engrossed in Almond Joy and Porky Pig while languid crowds swept past. Smell, color,
and mood combined in a wonder and delight that we existed at all. Gradually the mood would fade, or it might call to me from the faint center of a dream. Suddenly I was more than the recipient of a make-believe saucer, I was ward and guardian of the universe itself!

Its nether side was blind terror. The less there was to explain it, the more powerful its claim. It happened one night, as I came into the dining room for supper. I just looked at everyone seated there at the table—Mommy, Daddy, Jonny, Debby. Bridey was serving halved grapefruits for a starter. I adored sectioned grapefruits with a light coating of sugar, but the ambient shade of the walls was too pale. I thought, “This is it, forever—no!” I couldn’t relent to it, so I ran into my bedroom, hurled myself onto its blankets, and clutched them tight enough in my fingers and palms to make a hole in reality if such was possible. A beam of black light shot through my forehead—an apparition far graver yet more aware of who I was.

I could tell later, from their judging looks, they thought it was that I’d rather be at Grossinger’s, but it was more a feeling of having come into the wrong century, the wrong existence altogether.

Across the landscape of our shared childhood my brother and I commanded a repertoire of games, concurrently chummy and cutthroat. The two of us were trapped inescapably in combat and collaboration. That our relationship was a competition was taken for granted, for we were born onto opposite teams—dogged opponents from the get-go like the Union and Confederacy. Our battles activated grudges from just beneath the surface, as we fought with tokens and cards, with rubber bands and words, and in currying parental favor.

Neither Jon nor I understood how our parents played us off against each other or used our enmity to defeat Grossinger’s and get their long-sought revenge. Ironically it wasn’t Bob who most perfunctorily scapegoated me, it was Martha. He was a dupe for her exotic legends and paranoid fantasies, and all too easily goaded. He respected her ferocity and intelligence, plus he didn’t want to be left behind by a woman on the march. In their gaze Jon and I could never exhibit too much affinity. If we did, they would find a way to spur us to combat like prize roosters. So, my brother and I had to find each other in secret, unacknowledged ways.

Our fraternization was imbedded in the diplomacy needed to conduct an open-ended clash. We would not have carried out such a ritual if we hadn’t hated each other, but likewise we could not have carried it out unless we were in simpatico. We had to concur on ethics and rules. The statutes of war, while not always obvious, invariably became so without undue dispute. Yet our surface rage
blinded us to how we shared a mindset and an agenda—how we read the terms of engagement identically.

Much of our childhood was spent deciding in which competition to engage next and then enacting the chosen match, for there were long hours to fill. We would go from board and card games to baseball derivatives and other improvised contests of skill, strategy, and luck.

After setting up cowboys and Indians along the end of the hall, we aimed a marble back and forth, trying to knock over each other’s plastic figures. A perfect shot might ricochet and topple two or more of them. As the field became emptier of targets, hits became more difficult. We rolled back and forth, targeting the last standing men, often chasing the errant pellet down the hall and around the corner. Sometimes we included farm animals and knights and gave extra points for getting the marble up the ramp into the castle.

In another contest we set trash cans at opposite walls and tried to bounce a Spaldeen into it, either directly (for one point) or off the wall and back in (for two points) or off the wall and upon a second bounce (for three points). We played a related game on the sidewalk with a Spaldeen and a dime; only there we stood farther apart and tried to hit and spin up the coin on a fly.

A plop in a cylinder, the spin and clink of a dime, the recoil of a falling horse into two upright figures brought an ineffable jubilation every time.

Among our regular games were Chutes and Ladders, Quizkids, and Uncle Wiggily’s rainbow maze, the boards as intimate to us as our own lives. A meandering numbered path led from Wiggily’s ramshackle bungalow in the lower lefthand corner—the rheumatoid rabbit setting out with cane and bag—to Dr. Possum sticking his snouty head out the stone house with its patchwork gray chimney at square 151 (upper right). In between lay the Skillery-Scallery Alligator with open jaws, the dreaded Rabbit Hole under the rotted trunk and ferns (back to square 13), the Wibble Wobble Pond (which was either good or bad depending on how far before or after square 60 you had gotten when you drew its yellow card), and the Bad Pipsisewah and Fox Den (where a player lost turns).

We played in order to reexperience the board’s radiant landscape and to renew our eternal rivalry. The cards, both white and colored, were familiar, but their sequences made them novel, disclosing unforeseeable outcomes—and those were infinite. Since our personal battle was never resolved, each new match presented a fresh opportunity to query fate.

I remember the excitement at drawing a 10 or 15, the sinking sensation when Jonny got one, the pleasure when he was sent back to the Bushytail Squirrel Tree after he was almost to Dr. Possum’s. No amount of repetition diminished the novelty of those moments. It was always a delight to see Jonny slide down the major chute at 87 all the way back to 24—or land on Skeezicks’ mouth. That never lost its unique thrill.

The boldly black-scripted cards of Sorry! with their numerical scriptures occupied another domain of our minds, as we raced to get four pawns of our color (red, yellow, green, or blue) around a track of periodically slide-enhanced squares. The plastic round-based, beadlet-topped tokens were clean and evocative—primary hues. Ones and twos released pawns into activity. Twelves conferred leaps forward, but an opportune four (backwards only) could dispose of the whole circuit around the board and put a token on the edge of the Safety Zone, an inopportune four set you back as well as waste a draw. Sevens were divisible in any combination between two pieces. Elevens allowed changing places with an opponent, a potential double whammy. A ten could be played as one-backwards in a gamble that required a quick second ten (or a four) to save a loss of the move and a longer journey around the board anyway.

I usually took the yellow, him the red—blue and green went unplayed. We so identified with yellow or red that their draws and strategies swept our minds clean of everything except completing the circuit and tucking all four pawns into the safety zone. I knew his red so well I was reminded of it when I saw a bright red toy or picture. I flinched a bit inside: red was the enemy, a show-off’s color. I felt sordid pleasure in knocking off a red token with an assassin Sorry! card just short of it gaining immunity, likewise in bringing home two delicious canary yellows with a seven.

I responded just as exigently to an icon of a rope or candlestick, a golden $500 Monopoly bill, the ten of diamonds in Casino, or a yellow Marvin Gardens card. I lived for the bliss of Park Place and Boardwalk under my ownership, a red hotel on either awaiting Jonny’s next toss of the dice. These moments, and the strategies generating them, temporarily replaced reality, as they explicated our brotherhood—telling us who this Jonathan, this Richard were. Without them we were in free fall, for there were no other safe boundaries or wayposts in the Towers realm, no fallback life-jackets or life-jacket-like roles.

Baseball variants were our favorites, and our mainstay was sockball. With a tennis racquet as our bat, socks tightly wound as our ball, one of us lobbed in a pitch. The batter did not so much whack as aim for spots in our room—a bid at finesse.

Singles were drives that bounced uncaught off a hollow canopy around the ceiling. They had to be smacked hard and aimed well or they’d be caught in the small room. Doubles landed on Jon’s or my bed. Almost always rebounds off walls, they came to a state of rest on either coverlet.

A catch, even a rebound, resulted in a double play, though a catch off the high canopy simply negated a single into an out.

A waste-paper can placed before the radiator was a triple. One never aimed for triples. They were accidents. To see a sock bounce off the wall delicately into the can was as exhilarating as a golfer getting a hole-in-one. Likewise, a sock rolling on a chair, about to rest there or topple, was spellbinding, as was any rolling orb between outcomes, where it would stop: fair or foul, a score or nothing.

Positioning on a grid was a way of seeing the world, an innate phenomenology of weights, shapes, and objects. Jonny and I could play from any angle at any scale, whether tiddly-winks in the hall, shuffleboard on a Nevele court, or flipping cards. When there wasn’t a game in progress, we set instantaneous measures anyway. Watching a stray ball roll from a game of other kids across a sidewalk in the Park, a spiny horse chestnut plunk from a tree, we knew instinctively the boundary, the odds, and when to cheer for a placement
and score, like the time a falling acorn bounced once before landing in a park water fountain. “Triple!” we called out spontaneously.

The bedroom left field window at 6B had a glass guard set against it at a forty-five-degree angle. Inside it was a home run, either on a soft lob or a carom off a wall. A lob might be defended by a leap, with the sock sometimes accidentally batted down into a double for the opponent. However, there was a perfect arc, just over the pitcher, gentle enough so it didn’t bounce off the window back past the guard. A home run was the most delicate shot of all.

Our mother detested sockball and came to recognize its sounds from afar. Even when we played in a disciplined hush, we couldn’t hide the game’s cadence. She charged in, grabbing the racquet away. She thought baseball belonged outdoors, but, more notably, she believed socks were for wearing, not batting, and she was convinced ours went out the window, even though it was shut tight.

Hers, though, was a self-fulfilling prophecy because, after she suggested the idea to us, we opened the window a little bit behind the guard to add drama to home runs. There was a garbage can on 96th Street and, if one of us put it in that, you got credit for winning ten games. Needless to say, it never happened, though my friend Phil took up the challenge and landed one so close we were astonished. It was thrilling anyway to run to the window and watch a home run sail out of sight and then spot it down on the street below. Sometimes a pedestrian looked up in astonishment—a sock from the sky! We would interrupt the inning and take the elevator to the street to collect it.

Ramon the elevator man was not amused by the extra summonses and trips, but contrary to our mother’s belief, no one wanted our socks, and we never lost a single one at sockball. They disappeared for other reasons, an issue of general cosmology not resolved to this day.

At other times we staged epic rubber-band fights, ducking behind furniture and firing with our favorite weapons. Mine was a porcelain statue of a stalking tiger I won at Skee-ball. I strung my “bullets” around its mouth and aimed usually at Jon’s butt. It was a great pajamas sport, rolling on the rug, pulling our bottoms back up amid
hurried attempts to zing bare bohunkus. When our stockpiles ran out, we collected shots from all over the room, different colors and sizes of rubber bands that had come to rest on, under, and behind objects, and returned them to our ammunition bags.

Though we didn’t keep a cumulative score, Jonny and I had an unerring feel for who had won more life-to-date. I held an edge at age nine, but as he got older and bigger, he gained the upper hand, and the all-time tally fell into doubt, so it needed to be adjudicated again and again. We certainly knew who was winning lately, and it mattered a great deal; it determined the mood between us, our relative prestige and power in the apartment. And though we played countless rounds with varying outcomes, we seemed to know that only one of us would finally win.

I tried to disguise my pleasure in victories, but I didn’t fool Jon. He liked to lord his successes over me. If I lost, I’d often bargain at once for a new game, all the while trying to maintain an older sibling’s air of superiority. He preferred to savor his triumphs. It often took teasing or a bribe to get him to play again. “If you win this next one,” I’d say, “it counts double,” as if I could sell such a blatant ploy.

“I don’t care,” he’d retort. “I’m champion.” That would sting despite my determination to stay above such fatuous boastfulness.

We spent so much time together that our competition blended almost indiscernibly into camaraderie. Our antipathy would soften, reconcile, and become its antithesis: fellowship, intimacy, something resembling love. The shifts were obscure, unaccountable, and disconcerting—and usually begrudging. Because we were uncomfortable with each other, we were less embarrassed by stalemates of inured hostility than lapses of affection. We didn’t acknowledge good will as readily as mutual hatred. I couldn’t stand having such a hoodlum get a close-up look at me or witness my gaffes and fears, my wet sheets. His condescending smirk needed no words and took no holidays.

He couldn’t bear me watching him either but, whereas I flinched with shame, he lashed out in wounded pride and defiance.

Roommates and companions of necessity, we lay in bed at night watching the Knickerbocker Beer sign blink on and off in the northern distance over Harlem, pretending it was a signal to Martian ships or smugglers on the Hudson. Whispering across the room, we filled the interval before sleepiness with games—Animal-Vegetable-Mineral, Initials, Geography—hushed undertones so as not to arouse the Cyclops.

For numberless hours we would perch beside our record-player, laying our favorite disks on the rubber wheel and setting the needle down, using pins from Mommy’s pin cushion when we ran out:
“There’s a little white duck sitting on the water,”
and
“… among the leaves so green-o.”
Blending with buttered toast and vegetable soup, these tunes spun webs of afternoons, a symphony of lives played by pipers in an upholstered box. When a narrator signaled us, we turned pages to follow Bozo the Clown on his travels through Europe and Asia, from the Leaning Tower of Pisa and the Eiffel Tower to the lair of the Wild Man of Borneo with the ring on his nose. In
Bozo Under the Sea
the clown in diving gear visited sea horses, fish with lights, even a great whale. We stuck our faces in a sink of water and mimicked his bubble-filled voice exclaiming, “What could that creature be?” (It was an octopus.)

Mr. Borrig, the super, was Jon’s and my chief nemesis, continually coming to the front door with complaints from the apartment beneath. That would lead to prompt punishments—a confiscation of the tennis racquet, an early bedtime, sometimes a whipping. Overly exuberant tumbling catches and dives to block the socks from landing on a bed were often followed by a ringing doorbell. Once, in revenge, we lowered a red water-balloon on the end of a string slowly down six storeys and, as Borrig sat on his customary stool by the service entrance on 96th Street, set it softly on his bald pate before ducking back inside. I don’t know how we got away with that one—who else would have done it?—but there were no repercussions.