New Moon (2 page)

This was the lost garden, its goblets of watercolors.

I waited there, outside the flow of time.

Then Nanny came with a policeman.

The summer of 1949, our Oldsmobile piled with suitcases, Daddy took us to a house in Westport and returned to the city to work. Everywhere trees surrounded houses.

I lay in grass and the purple flowers. I stared at swooping birds. Wind stampeded branches against a blue canopy, each leafy ripple singing “Cruising Down the River.”

I tracked fuzzy caterpillars on twigs and watched processions of ant armies into and out of their castles. I played trucks and cars on the pavement, found buried marbles, peeled and sharpened sticks into white arrows and made bows with twigs and string. I drew fat boys and girls on the sidewalk with colored chalk sticks.

It was a summer of lime and strawberry jellos, packages of pineapple charms and peppermint rings with holes, bells of the Good Humor truck, black raspberry coated in thin, cold chocolate. I watched a lemon and cherry world through lollipop wrappers and collected prizes and cartoons from the bottom of boxes of wrapped candy and Cracker Jacks.

With a shovel I dug lines for seeds, then set them in, one by one, like on the farm in my Little Golden Book. I graded the dirt, and Nanny and I stamped on it.

One morning, barely visible sprigs had emerged from our furrows.

With his tools a workman in overalls put together a Donald Duck bike with training wheels. I tore along concrete making up adventures.

“Is Judy there?” I asked her mother standing in front.

The big girls were allowed to take me to the playground and candy store.

“She went to the lake today,” her mother said. “Is it important?”

I nodded.

I rode around the block again … and again. Each circuit I checked.

“Judy’s still not home.”

I pedalled to the corner. I turned and looked down the block, its canopy of trees eerie and portentous. I travelled along its tunnel. I turned the corner again and passed my own house.

Judy was standing in her yard. Her presence startled me; I had not expected her so soon. I tore past on my Donald racer, wolves in pursuit. I heard Judy’s mother calling in bewilderment, trying to tell me that Judy was home.

Nanny taught me to pull up weeds in my garden. I felt sorry for the discarded plants, their roots smelling of trolls and dragons. Carrots from the farmer’s stand had the same sweet aroma and they weren’t poison. I could swallow their rust.

My garden rows had grown into little stalks with nips of fuzzy beans, and I was lying on the ground, face up close, my nose touching, when I heard Mommy’s voice.

“Dinner time!”

“It’s still sunny,” I complained. The world was bathed in pale saffron light.

She poured me a cup from a brown bottle. “The days are getting longer.”

I knew that wasn’t the answer. I looked suspiciously at the gold apple bubbles, drank them in a gulp. Trees rustled on the horizon. The moon was too large.

I lay in bed. Fading umber prowled the perimeters. I pushed against it with my mind, refusing its luminosity.

I woke to the whine of Nanny making juice, wet PJs matted to my skin.

Daddy came for the weekend. Before I knew he was back, he had mowed my whole bean patch. It was hard to tell there was anything but grass. Mommy had one of her laughing fits. “He’s a city boy,” she said. “He doesn’t know a tomato from an artichoke.” Then Daddy got angry at me for crying.

“It’s only goddamned string beans. You know how many string beans there are in the world? You want more string beans, I’ll buy string beans.”

He did in fact return from the store with a huge bagful and dumped them on the table.

At summer’s end we went to a Punch and Judy show. Chains of purple lollipops were distributed at the ticket counter, big children directing the crowd. I was sucking my grape when a witch puppet burst in, cackling. My baby brother started crying. Mommy hushed him, but he only got louder, so we ran down the aisle, into a night of more twinkles than I had ever seen.
“The stars above, the one I love, / waiting for the moon….”

Mommy took me and the cousins in an armada of taxis to view one of her favorite alter egos, Mary Martin (as Peter Pan). This was the zenith of the Mommy realm: flying actors, dancing crocodiles, Tinkerbell above a pirate galley. We all cheered for her failing light to be relit.

Another time, Mommy led me silently on the longest walk ever, traipsing determinedly in her chunky black coat into the Park, along paths, through tunnels, past lakes with toy boats.

I had never seen any of these places.

We came to an amazing land—castles, moats, rocky precipices. Its creatures played in cages: porcupines, tortoises, elephants, snakes, flamingos; lions sleeping and snoring, their orange fur going up and down. Bears prowled pale boulders, then splashed in a grotto.

Mommy sat on a bench and read while I watched seals climb onto rocks. I scanned the black eagerly, hoping to spot flutters as they surfaced with comical snorts. Then—she finally said okay—I entered a brick castle by myself. In a screeching room, monkeys dashed about, hung from single arms, made funny faces. I called
for her to come. She shook her head and said the smell made her nauseous. I liked its jungleness, so I walked through again, mesmerized by the antics of little beings. When I arrived at the other end, she was waiting in daylight. I reached for her hand.

Sometimes she would seize me on her lap and sing in another language:

“Are you sleeping, are you sleeping?” she insisted of me in a bemused voice.

She pulled my face into hers and rubbed our noses together. Then she swung me scarily outward, letting me drop until my head tilted backwards:

I knew what was coming next. Our boat was in a storm. We were going to sink. Were we going to drown?

“Are you going to fall; are you going to fall?” shaking me an extra time and tickling my belly.

Then she shouted, “No!,” pulled me back with a rough jerk, and hugged me.

Rescued again!

They held my fifth birthday at our apartment. Mommy insisted we wear silly hats and carry wands of rainbow maché. At each doorbell aunts and uncles arrived with cousins. Jostled among large kids, I tore open wrapping paper to find stuffed animals, trucks, and puzzles.

In a last tiny box (about which Mommy showed unusual interest) was cotton around a barbell-shaped rattle. She said it was real gold and given to me by someone named Irving Berlin. He was a famous man from her world. I ran my fingers across the bumps his name left on the metal.

They brought the dining-room chairs into the living room and set them in a row facing different ways. I couldn’t guess the purpose.
Then impish music began. Unexpectedly it stopped. The game was to sit in the chairs first because they took one away each time while the music played. Everyone pushed and shoved hard.

I lost my place and sat by the side while Mommy delighted in her role at the victrola, setting down and raising the needle. A man in a clown suit pulled strings of pastel handkerchiefs out of a tube, and my Uncle Eddie blew balloons and twisted them into animal shapes so rapidly that the room was filled with floating creatures as I ran, slapping them in the air.

Nanny placed a cake with blue frosting and candles in front of me. Mommy held a shining sword. With her weight we came down together through the frosting. Then I filled myself with yellow.

At first I might have seemed to my mother like a generic child. She left my care to Nanny as she passed me in her distractions. Gradually we developed a true antipathy.

A boy inside me was inattentive, stumbling, late. I was never grateful enough. I spilled my plate. I dropped my glass on the floor and it smashed. I fumbled my toothbrush into the toilet.

Mommy punished me with quick, sharp slaps, calling out my blame so shrilly my ears hurt. She grabbed my toys and threw them. She sent me to bed without dinner. She made me sit on a stool facing the wall. Yet I continued to misbehave: toothpaste on my jammies, crayon drawings on the wall, pee in my bedsheets, water on the floor.

Too late I felt the trickle down my legs: the reddest flower germinating in my core, engulfing me like a second skin.

Later it turned into a cold wire fence.

Nanny pulled down my pants and pointed to reddened thighs. “You’re going to make yourself sick!”

One morning, playing on Park Avenue, I decided I would ride my fire truck through the bronze plug. I kicked off and rolled its way, then … a rush of sparkles and pain … standing outside the door in another body that was screaming, my hand against my head soaked with blood. They called Aunt Dotty, and she came with us to the hospital for stitches, nine of them—ouch! ouch! ouch!

Another time, I decided to leave a surprise when Mommy left her bath running to answer the phone. I got books off her shelves and turned them into boats, setting them one by one on the surface of the water. I was gleeful, proud of myself as I watched them float and sink. I ran away before she could return.

She screamed and called for me. I told her I was washing them for her. Trembling and wild, she whacked me with a hairbrush. “Mischief, mischief,” she said. “You’re nothing but a big mischief.”

She thought I had a disease. She squeezed my chest, felt my neck. When my knee got puffy and swollen, she had me walk back and forth. She detected a limp. She asked Dr. Hitzig about polio, a word I had never heard. He shook his head: “The boy is fine.” We both knew that he was lying.

She took me to his friend Dr. Hunt, a brusque, humorless man who handled my body mechanically, drawing on my skin with his crayon, shining a cold tool in my ears and eyes, listening to my chest and tummy through his probe, finally putting me naked on a metal stand and turning out the lights. I huddled there shivering while he made pictures of my insides. Then she and Nanny talked with him in his private room.

As I watched her behind the soundproof window, imploring him, I thought of Santa:
“He’s gonna find out if you’re naughty or nice….”
I propelled a small wooden train around the floor, wondering if Dr. Hunt had glimpsed the terrible thing inside me. The way Mommy looked at me afterwards I knew it was bad. It had to do with wetting. I had a disease they couldn’t see. That’s why they were making pictures of my bones.

Daddy sold his yellow Olds and got a green Mercury. Mommy told him to put it in the garage till we had to go somewhere, but he said, “Let me show it off, Martha!” He took us on a ride into the country, but he went too fast and curvy. He and Mommy were yelling at each other. In auto smell and cigarette smoke I tasted orange juice and began to cry. “He’s carsick, Bob.” I clutched the seat. Everywhere I turned was dizziness. I began to whimper.

Daddy didn’t want to stop. His lips were pressed, and he smacked the dashboard. Mommy smiled and teased him.

I stood by the roadside. At my feet in clover was a bee, spreading lavender grains. I didn’t care if he was a stinger; his undulating fur and humming filled my mind. Far off in the field, bugs and butterflies floated; orange-black susans shone like elfin pots. I smelled honey. Then car-tasting liquid poured out of me into the dust.

The haunting was the worst, tendrils of poison spreading along my throat and belly, colder than ice. I felt the reverberation of an earlier, more catastrophic thing. But what could that have been?

Then one afternoon Nanny left her radio on in the kitchen and a voice said: “Yet another one fell down the stairs, into the dungeon … forever!”

“… forever …!”

I heard it and was stunned that it dared come so close, a child’s simple consideration of what a telling meant:
This is real.
And I am in it,
forever.
I felt my mind balk, then the universe come apart, an abyss beyond artifice—obscure, hostile, spreading.

My life sank into infinity against the other. It wouldn’t listen. It had never listened. Frosty the Snowman
“… alive as he could be …”
was a mere jingle against the resonance of existence.

Most children would have mocked the voice as dramaturgy of little consequence. A different kid might have thought, “Wow, that was scary!” and writhed in delight. Not me. It wasn’t the dungeon per se, which resembled trite threats on television and at the theater: evil vicars, cutthroat pirates, Ming the Merciless. Those were make-believe. But there was a prerogative behind the voice that neither its hack author nor sinister narrator recognized. It expressed something I had always known, a prophecy eking into a vague room in an obscure city, a witch cooking poisons while her chattle waited.

I could pretend to be safe in a family, but camouflage didn’t hide me. The smudge on the far horizon wasn’t just an inkling; it was
exactly what it looked like.
“They” could come for me at any time, put an end to such paltry protection. They could do anything they wanted, for there was no one to stop them. It was futile to imagine
outrunning them by being alive. Even policemen were cartoon dolls.

“… into the dungeon … forever!”

Since I couldn’t escape or hide, I ran into the hallway and, finding nowhere else to go, writhed in terror, screaming, shivering, stamping in place, socking at anyone who dared console me, tearing away as the vertigo went deeper. It turned into sensations I didn’t know even existed.

I didn’t understand the sound coming out of me—I was keening.

The adults, not guessing the cause of my jig—not that it would have made any difference if they had—tried to convince and inveigle me. They shouted for me to stop. But they were rote and irrelevant, their yells and histrionics a farce.

They had no idea what I was confronting. My mother, however Xtaby-like, was just a lady. The real danger wasn’t a poison or disease. It was
much
worse.

I believe the haunting was primordial and did not occur in language.

Its vigilance is forever.