New Moon (19 page)

At unpredictable times Mommy seemed inundated by feelings of tenderness for us; she would address us with giddy appreciation. She’d tell funny stories and display an uncanny memory of all the good things we ever did. Where had our Mummsy Wine been hiding? Why did we not know that she was keeping track of our virtues too.

But even as she eulogized, she was challenging us to doubt her, pleading with us not to make a false move because then we would be responsible for the return of winter. Her cheerfulness was so fragile that we never completed an episode without an onset of suspicion. “What’s wrong? Why won’t you tell me?” We knew it couldn’t last.

No description of my mother does her justice because her reality contained so many other layers and anomalies. She wasn’t unhappy as much as she was inconsolable. She met us with a fierceness and vengeance that had no object, merely a longing to set things right in a condition in which something incredible was expected of all of us that we could never enact … and then at times she could be so gay we followed her like the pied piper, this woman who turned men’s heads on the street. She must have held in her mind a magnificent object, a requiem big as the sky, a kaleidoscope of all the songs Irving Berlin ever wrote, one
“Easter bonnet/girl that I marry/white Christmas,”
but no way to meet her there, no way to get into her imaginary paradise.

Sometimes it will all come back in a flash of déjà vu: the walk to the barbershop, the color of light against a particular building at a time of day, Michel with his scissors, the hair all around us on the floor … how I woke in the middle of a winter night, shivering, trying to hold the lost tendril of a dream, wet bedsheets clinging to goose bumps in lost watches of the night. I lay in damp warm islands diminishing slowly to ice. Getting toasty was my whole existence as I shivered against the clammy flannel.

Finally, I roused myself, spread my sheets and blankets on radiator pipes, and lay atop them in imaginary summer, aromatically steaming them dry, until sun itself rose through city stone—first light blending with vapors from my own body.

I will feel the melancholy of then, suspended in a sorrow I will
always have. I did not minimize the pain later. I simply engorged it. I changed it into something else, as I changed—into a numb, flattened ache so that now I remember mainly how desolate it was. Nothing will ever feel that old way again because, back then, I imagined that my range of feelings and possibilities
was
the world. I had no reason to suspect it would ever be different, that I would be paroled. And I adhered to it like a penitent because it also held mystery, depth, and wonder of my own being.

The things I did during childhood do not seem as important to me as the overall mystery of it. I went from one event to another, as the Buddhists say, like a drunken monkey. Toys, games, comics, candy bars—these are what we are raised on in the West, and in much of the world they are considered the acme, worth rewriting history for.

Years later I look back on that childhood with dismay. What did I learn compared to peasant children in China who worked the farms and raised food for villages? What about the self-sufficient offspring of the Eskimo and other northern tribes? From the beginning they are taught where they are, the habitats of plants and animals, and how to find their way home in a blizzard. If they have spooks, the tribal elders gather for a ceremony to honor and release them. Alien forces are named and addressed respectfully; they are not allowed free rein in a child’s mind. A boy is given his own totems, the wind to ride.

In 1950s New York City we were raised in an arcade without a sense that our survival was provisional. In place of spirit release, we had doctors, churches, synagogues—stand-ins for the power of the cosmos, its capacity to transform and heal.

Behind the scattered memes and memories of childhood, a vast incomprehensible fog envelops my life. I can create names for that fog, but they are intellectual constructs. The original sadness was an ocean. It wasn’t only sad; it was sensual and rich, and I swam in its eternity—a planet of waters as large, in scale, as the lake into which
The African Queen
plunged in the movie. It too had lightning and demon cruisers. There was no opposite shore to that lake, but childhood was the process of sailing there anyway. Fear was my
guardian, but fear was the same as timelessness—unrelinquishable, impenetrable.

Games kept me busy—toys, comic books, movies, water guns—so that a yellow plastic Sorry! token or a green Pennsylvania Avenue card brings back the whole enchantment.

During fifth and sixth grades I remained a member of Bill-Dave Group and loyal friend and foil of Phil Wohlstetter. A list of our adventures would fill five volumes. Good old Phil—switch-hitting shortstop, platoon leader, Tom Quest himself. We shared the Yankees, the Hardy Boys, and a litany of cards, comics, and capers.

Most adults admired Phil’s spunk and irreverence and laughed at his antics, but to my mother he was a juvenile delinquent on the brink of big-time trouble—another in my legion of errors in character judgment starring Dr. Fabian and Aunt Bunny. Phil had been caught by Jessie in the act of stealing. He had talked me into throwing my undershirt out the window to win a bet with Jonny Wouk. He had led us on nutty detective ventures that brought the police.

Yet by fifth grade Phil was being tutored for prep school as if a newly discovered scholastic genius. Prior to that, he had been as much of an anarchist and goof-off as me, albeit with better grades. Now he lorded his status over me, quoting algebraic formulas to prove his ascension to seventh- and then eighth-grade math, spicing his sassy slang with new vocabulary. Miss Fitzgerald, our teacher, infuriated my mother by saying she wished some of my friend’s spark would rub off on me: “He’s just so energetic and creative.”

“If you follow her advice,” Daddy said, “you’ll end up in jail.”

“Daydream” was the word most often written on my report cards. That didn’t require much perspicacity from my teachers. But they thought I just didn’t pay attention; they had no idea what I was imagining. Beside such sagas, school hardly moved the needle.

I spent my summers at Chipinaw, ascending the row of bunks with Jay, Barry, and whatever three or four miscellaneous kids were assigned to our cabin. Some years we had “good” counselors who threw in with us. In Bunk 9 Sam Rosenberg spent what seemed like half his salary on food and prizes for his boys—he also gave up time-off during rest periods to serve as commissioner for our All-Star Baseball tournaments, arranging brackets and umpiring the matches. When we began fighting over Yankee, Dodger, and Giant farm clubs for our team names, he resolved the matter by making us pick other minor-league towns in Colorado, Kansas, and Nebraska.

Bunk 12 saw us in constant strife with authority, punished for poor inspections and bad attitudes. As Jay, Barry, and I made improvisational horseplay and insubordination a way of life, we were deemed bad influences on our bunkmates. But it was our métier, for we were pretty much what the constabulary told us we were: goof-offs, lazy slobs.

Because I had a growing reputation as a prankster, Jay and Barry liked to egg me into providing entertainment: water traps over doorways, sometimes with dangling strings to tempt; unmaking beds and short-sheeting them so that the victim would be unable to get his feet down; conducting all sorts of unlikely movements of unlikely objects.

I could ill explain some of my demonic streaks. In the middle of one night, I collected a few baseballs, bars of soap, and loose moccasins from people’s cubbies, tiptoed through the bathroom, and tossed them over the divider into the next bunk, causing an impressive clatter of thuds and clunks, especially for the hour. I hadn’t known that I was going to this; the deed furnished its own impetus. Tearing back to my bed, I pretended to be asleep.

I repeated this bizarre disturbance twice more over the next week. The kids in the adjoining cabin were fired up to identify their nemesis and get revenge.

Jay, Barry, and I had a bunkmate that year even sloppier and more eccentric than me. His first name was also Richard, and he corrected mispronunciations of his last name Oranger so prissily that we contrived garbles of it. On my return to bed from the third
enactment of my stunt, I pushed Oranger, covers and all, onto the floor before diving under my sheets. The lights went on, and soon our bunk was filled with O.D.’s and kids from next door (remember, O.D.’s were older campers with paid jobs, one of which was to oversee bunks after Taps).

“Well, if you don’t remember doing it, dammit,” said a frustrated O.D., “you must have sleepwalked.”

To my horror Oranger agreed.

Years later Jay and Barry were still telling the story. “And that’s why,” Barry would conclude ceremoniously, “you don’t see the Orangeman today.”

But I rued the cruel-hearted imp who incriminated a meek boy when he should have been his ally and friend. I had no more planned to push him on the floor than commit the crime in the first place;
I just did it.

My pranks represented gaps in myself, when I felt more poignancy than I could bear and there were no other outlets. I vaguely recall that when I tossed the items over the wall the first time, I was responding to an evocative smell of toothpaste and soap near the sinks. Feeling equal parts attraction and repulsion, I acted rashly and resolved the matter.

At Chipinaw, nonconformity was my safety valve, mutiny my artform. I rebelled instinctively, going truant from activities like a dog slipping his leash. Not only didn’t I swim, I skipped other activities.

I played seasons of solitaire Roofball. In this game a Spaldeen was tossed onto a bunk roof, and it was either caught by me on the rebound for an out or it landed and then bounced (single … double … triple … home run … depending on how long it took me to chase it down). An irregular roof with peaks and vales was far more challenging than a stone wall. I learned the bumps, elbows, and slopes of the various bunks and used them as different home fields. The ball could be angled high so that it ricocheted back as a long fly ball, or I could attempt to fool myself (or an imaginary opponent) with spins, recoils off pipes sticking through the roof,
rolls along seams, or even innocent sequences of bounces that either just hit or just missed the front lip. I cultivated these techniques as well for matches with friends during free play.

Counselors would announce our required activity, but I would be camouflaged between the back of a bunk and the woods. The grass was unmown there, the weeds often wet from dew. “McDougald into the hole … fields … throws … gets him!” I would toss the rubber pinky as high as I could, then back up like an outfielder against a wall, coil, and leap at the edge of the forest to meet the apogee of the ball’s arc off the roof, stealing a home run and falling into moist foliage. “There’s a long drive … Mitchell back … that ball is going … going…. ”

Sometimes they forgot to look for me, and I played through a whole period. More often I was herded to where I belonged, the daily regimen of games, hikes, lessons, and drills—softball, hardball, tennis, lanyards, volleyball, soccer, track, boxing, nature cabin, swimming, rowboats, canoes. These were relentlessly imposed, with meals, rest period, and meager slots of free time.

The worst were archery and riflery. I could barely hold the arrow straight while pulling on the giant bow or point it anywhere near large straw-stuffed bulls-eyes. I didn’t want anything to do with the rifle range’s gunpowder and empty shells, which we were warned not to touch because they could give us lockjaw, such a terrifying prospect that I kept moving my mouth and tongue while I routinely missed the entire paper target despite aligning the sights. These weapons were powerful and scary. Steel-tipped sticks and metal slugs that moved too fast to be seen but made ominous hisses, clanks, and holes didn’t belong in our unpredictable paws. I pictured arrows through chests and gunned-down young cowboys.

In retrospect, I estimate that my life at Chipinaw was twenty percent successful escapes, eighty percent conscription, but my extemporizations were richer and more memorable. It wasn’t that the regular activities were always awful and unpleasant, but counselors’ continual sanctimony and coercion made them feel like punishment rather than fun. There was zero recognition of the need to dawdle, laze, imagine, just stare. For me, playing hooky was intrinsic and visceral.

I made up another private game in which I would stand at the downhill edge of a long hangar-like building called “the armory” (which housed the crafts shop and theater) and fungo a hardball as far as I could, converting the adjacent landscape into a baseball zone with designated hits. I revised and nuanced this event over many a summer, as it settled into my most ambitious and reliable diversion.

Over the hedge in front of the girls’ dining room was a homer; before the hedge was a triple. Up to the end of the armory was a double. Past the midpoint of the stairs was a single. Everything else was an out.

There was an ambrosial sensation to tossing a ball up, swatting it, then seeing where its flight landed it, in what patch or rough, near and far, as I narrated the play silently (à la Mel Allen). I took my time, savoring the sun’s warmth and occasional breezes over my sweaty brow, stopping to watch the flights of bugs, to blow dandelion heads.

Reaching the hedge on a fly was an epiphany—a soaring bird, a squirrel hiding its farthest nut, a spaceship dropping an Easter egg—and the memory of those rare synchronies of bat and ball, the torque of my swing, is ineradicable.

After each round or inning (the number of batters dependent on how many balls I had) I would retrieve my shots from all over the field as I continued to announce the game. I filled the home-team line-up with Yankee subs and farmhands whom I wanted in the major leagues and played people in odd or former positions (Don Bollweg at first, Pedro Gonzalez at second, Mickey Mantle at short, Kal Segrist at third). That alone made it special. “Gil McDougald leading off. Early Wynn winds and fires. It’s a drive down the left field line. He turns at first and holds. Now catcher Gus Triandos.” In the distance I could hear the echoes of camp events, remote like a half-forgotten dream.

After completing five innings, batter by batter, I’d collapse beneath a pine and review the action like a sportswriter, cozily AWOL. Eventually a counselor would come to fetch me back to whatever activity I had deserted.

At nap-time after lunch we got to stay in the bunk and play games, write postcards, get mail delivery, and follow baseball on the radio. Eager for the Yankee score, I galloped downhill from the mess hall, almost outpacing my own legs, thinking of how, in just another moment, I would crash onto those coarse green blankets, warmed by the sun, turn on the game in the second or third inning, and lie there listening.

This was a time of boundless nostalgia, reading letters from Mommy and Daddy, aunts and uncles, leisure in which to send them each back a Chipinaw postcard and tell them what I was doing. As I narrated my life, I imagined myself a character in a story, a forerunner of this text.

Radios were strictly forbidden in the mess hall or at any of our activities, but I began setting the Yankees in the outfield of softball games and beyond the fence of the tennis court, racing from activities to pick up a pitch or two and hopefully the score.

At Sunday evening barbecues, which were held on blankets hauled from our bunks, radios
were
allowed. Beside a plate of hamburger, beans, and potato chips, a slice of watermelon, I sank into the luxury of the second game of a doubleheader with its assortment of utility players. That was heaven.

On game nights I maintained my Yankee vigil in bed as stations crossed and interfered, the radio on softly so that O.D.s couldn’t hear. Mel Allen’s voice waned and came back through the darkness, and I pieced together missing action until I clicked the knob just before sleep. In the morning I turned to WINS 1010 for the final score.

Chipinaw was the liquored scent of its infirmary, the cracked paint of its bathrooms, the smell of old pipes and cleansers. It was rabbits that appeared at twilight and darted away at my approach. They had no intent to be part of the kingdom, but they dwelled in its environs.

I remember our bodies crammed together—in the bath-house at the lake, the bunk latrine while we brushed our teeth, along the armory wall in games of charades, on the floor in rough-housing and pillow fights—our clammy, clabbery aroma, childlike and dank.

Mealtimes at Chipinaw were loathsome but sensuous. The mess hall was a clatter of trays passing through swinging doors on waiters’ shoulders, cheers when one was dropped, giant ladle-bearing platters and basins of saltpeter- and MSG-spiced pottage (this intelligence awaited our more mature tenures), jugs of purple and orange Kool-Aid for our thirst. No one removed the live and dead flies that lodged above sugar level in the large shakers. A prank that never grew old was surreptitiously to pour sugar into the salt-shaker or, better yet, salt into the sugar urn. The dessert that brought the loudest cheers was single-serving ice-cream cups, vanilla, strawberry, chocolate, and chocolate chip, off the lids of which a thin paper layer could be peeled revealing a round baseball card with the face of a player.

The intricately eroded resin of table surfaces were like maps of other planets. In tedium before and between courses, we played a game across their width with salt and pepper, propelling the small glass shakers back and forth between contestants on opposite sides in an attempt to land part—even a fraction of the glass rim—over the edge so that a flat hand pressed against the table lip and then raised would jiggle or dislodge it. We sprinkled salt on the mottled maroon for better sliding and mastered a quick upward swipe (with an attendant grimace of “drats” or smirk of “no cigar,” depending on whether the shaker moved even a feather’s breadth). Usually the shaker stopped far short or went flying off the end and had to be caught by the facing player.

They fed us noodles and cheese onto which we poured a warm fruit-salad sauce; tasteless chow mein on soggy, cracker-like noodles; and egg and egg-salad gunks, vittles from which I willingly went hungry, awaiting rations from Grossinger’s or town.

In exchange for passes to the Hotel, we bribed counselors to drive into Monticello after Taps and bring back roast-beef sandwiches and potato knishes. Awakened past 1 a.m. for goodies wrapped in paper, sleepily we munched away, hearing our mentors rhapsodize about movie stars and babes in swimsuits by the G. pool. The smell of warm dough with its spud filling, the resilience of soft rye through its wrapper, harboring pickles and sliced pink meat, were dream-like assuagements of hunger.