New Moon (25 page)

As for my father, once I was walking with him along Central Park South when a blind man with a muzzled dog approached us and I put some change in his cup. “You were just taken in,” he proclaimed, “by one of the oldest rackets in the world.” I silently bit at my lip, which disappointed him, so he continued, “I betcha he’s not even blind.”

“So what?” I told him.

“Isn’t that why you gave him money?”

I shook my head. “I gave him money because he’s sad.”

“When you grow up you’ll see that the world is full of crooks. You can’t make everyone rich and everyone happy and, if you’ve got, those that don’t are going to be looking for ways to take it from you. Remember that.”

But I saw only chestnut vendors in rags, beggars crouched in alleys.

I befriended a dishwasher at the Hotel canteen, a gentle old Hungarian named Ziggy whose shoes were so ripped that his feet were more out than in. I asked him about them, and he said his toes hurt
so he had cut them open. I told Grandma Jennie.

“I can’t allow someone in my employ to be in that condition,” she exclaimed.

She had her driver take him to a podiatrist. When I met him next, he was wearing white therapeutic clogs. His eyes twinkled as he pointed down at them. Grandma was so proud of me that she told my father, but he wasn’t of like mind. He called me into his office and informed me gently but firmly that I should stay out of things I didn’t understand. He meant it as a joke, but it had a sinister air to it: “I can’t have you coming here if you’re going to tell Grandma about every employee who needs shoes. Because if you do we’re going to go bankrupt. She’ll reclothe the whole hotel and send everyone to the podiatrist.” He chortled. “That’s Mother for you.”

It wasn’t a joke to me: people were fired, and when I complained to my father, he was belligerent—it was none of my business. One day he would dispose of Big Milty too.

After the first term at Horace Mann it was not my mother who drove me. The competitive milieu of the school bccame my habitat. The fact that I nearly flunked all six years of grade school had lost all relevance: Richard Towers was a fiction and I no longer acknowledged his defects or disgrace.

I imposed an attractively spartan existence on myself, and the rest of the family was compelled to respect it. No one was allowed to interrupt my studying—and I was always studying. Finally I could ignore Jonny with impudence. I didn’t have to be a captive audience for his latest victories in the schoolyard or re-election as class president. I just excused myself from dinner early.

I had beaten my mother at her own game and won a haughty privacy.

Jonny was infuriated by this gambit. He tried to retaliate by ignoring me too, but I was a camel. I could go days, even weeks, without acknowledging his existence. No matter how loud he shouted or how often he imposed his body in front of mine I acted as though I neither saw nor heard him. Even if we came face to face I would
step around him and continue on my way—a preoccupied student. Eventually he would attack, or tell on me, but I would pretend that he had been disturbing my homework. For once he became the recipient of parental scolding: “Don’t distract your brother when he’s studying.”

“I’ll get you for this,” he said. He continued to report every slight in detail as if a truant officer logging my demerits. Gradually our mother became suspicious of my devotion to schoolwork. Jon was ever her sweet baby while I was the incorrigible saboteur from the other family. Suit and tie (and HM maroon) notwithstanding, she knew I couldn’t have been turned so suddenly into a gentleman scholar. Finally she clawed her way through my ruses.

“He can’t stand that child being happy and successful,” she proclaimed. “He’s jealous and wants to squash the joy out of him.”

Bob glowered at me as though his eyes had just been opened. “Mental cruelty,” he said. “Is that what you specialize in, you silent instigator, you no good…. You’re a real needler aren’t you, a real tormentor behind our backs.”

They were right of course, but I couldn’t back off. Jonny was just too virtuous and boastful. I couldn’t accept his kinship. My revulsion for him—his style and mien—was an unyielding compass of my existence.

At P.S. 6 I had been a loner, but at Horace Mann I seemed to be friends to some degree with just about everyone in my Form. One group of intellectuals, more articulate and world-wise than me, held an informal symposium during lunch and between classes. I joined them as they bunched up in halls and the cafeteria, trying to be part of their confabs which favored Marxism, classical music, and abstract mathematics. The only topic on which I could offer expertise was symbols and dreams. Once I got up my courage and spoke, I was surprised I held their interest.

Thereafter I established myself as an authority on hidden meanings and produced them on cue, finding them in assigned books from
My Ántonia
to
Martian Chronicles.
I descried them as well in daily words and acts, in popular songs and beer ads, and I interpreted
classmates’ dreams on request. No one thought that psychoanalysis was as substantial as Red China, set theory, or Bach—in fact, I was accused of capitalist sophism—still, it gave me a foothold among the intelligentsia.

I felt more comfortable with my buddies on the train. We gossiped about school and talked baseball, television shows, and subway routes. I was well into my second year before I realized that my friendships with these kids were suppositious. Boys in the train crowd maintained significant contact with one another on the outside, while I never engaged with any of them except en route to and from Horace Mann. I was still a child in that regard, participating in my family’s activities, their walks in Central Park and dinners out—and then I went to Grossinger’s every vacation.

I never thought of calling up my friends to see what they were doing, and it was inconceivable that I would invite any of them to our household, for we never had guests. During the whole of Horace Mann I think my mother’s brother Paul came to dinner twice, her legendary brother Lionel once (en route from Paris to Pittsburgh), my grandmother Sally maybe three times, my mother’s assistant from work (Helen) once, Bob’s pal Moe three or four times…. That was it except for a friend of Bridey’s picking her up. Our apartment was taboo, a sanctum where the privacies of the Towers family were carried out: the nuanced sarcasms, my mother’s facial packs, her early bedtimes, her “palpitations” (as she called her panics), our unabating derision of outsiders.

Not only would I have been ashamed to have anyone over, there was nothing to do at our place; our dramas occupied all the space. An outsider would not have gotten it. Even worse, we would not have known how to play our parts with strangers observing. There was no transition between private and public in 6B; it was
all
proscribed.

The Manhattan kids’ favorite hangouts were East Side coffee shops and movie theaters, carryovers from P.S. 6 and other grade schools. They talked on the subway about cute girls who frequented them, neighborhood parties on the weekends.

My mother was little help on the topic. In retrospect I see that she was relieved I showed no outward interest in girls. What caught
her attention, though, were the mailings from Horace Mann about formal dances. She wanted me to have the right social connections and decided that my next step was to learn to dance. Against my wishes (though I secretly appreciated the opportunity), I was signed up for Saturday classes at Miss Viola Wolfe’s on Madison Avenue, to which I had to wear not only a full suit like at Horace Mann but white gloves. The elderly Miss Wolfe taught us the steps first by far-too-swift examples to mimic except clumsily. Then she clicked her metal cricket, an assistant dropped the needle onto a record, and we each had to pick a partner and execute a fox trot or waltz, later the lindy and cha-cha.

The moment of choosing a partner was excruciating. I would set my imagination on a pretty girl or a friendly face and try to end up beside her. But I never seemed to move fast enough—musical chairs again.

Each time, with unimportant variations, the dancing was the same. We stood facing each other but not really looking, and then put our hands on the indicated spots of the other’s waist and shoulders (an assistant checked us pair by pair). The music began, and we attempted to carry out the proposed choreography for its duration, as the assistant and Miss Wolfe walked around, correcting us.

Usually we alternated partners in a sequence, so I even got to dance with the ones I wanted, but it made no difference. I was a poor dancer and the wrong boy, to boot. Anyway, at Viola Wolfe’s the other person didn’t exist; there were only rules and steps. The partner was an accessory to the lesson. And yet the partner was everything—the look on her face, her scent, the cloth or velvety feel of her dress, the stiffness or grace of her body in the dance.

I was Pip at Miss Havisham’s mansion, with the bare longing of regret.

Now that I attended Horace Mann, summers at Chipinaw felt even more incongruous and degrading. My classmates went to arts camps like Buck’s Rock in Pennsylvania. I was the only one, so far as I knew, dispatched like clockwork to a militaristic establishment. After all my studying successes, I protested, how could I still be required to go to a place full of anti-intellectuals and self-anointed drill sergeants? My mother sympathized, but my father was intransigent. Chipinaw was filled with Grossinger’s loyalists and patrons, plus he thought that it was better training for the real world than Horace Mann.

The summer after starting prep school I found a new escape: I volunteered for
The Chipinaw Chirp.
The camp newspaper—a one-page mimeographed collection of stories, jokes, and drawings—was put out weekly by a counselor as part of his job. Though I thought of the rag as useless, the
Chirp
’s new overseer, a journalism student named Alan Schecter, made me his assistant editor. I was the only candidate—the activity was too much like school for the average Chipinaw acolyte.

I was the ideal recruit. Trained in writing at Horace Mann, I also knew how to run a mimeo from working at the Grossinger’s New York office. Right off, Alan was determined to do something livelier than in previous years: “Let’s leave out the silly jokes and dumbo stories. We can cover camp events instead. Plus, we’ll load it with human-interest items.”

Since Alan also had six rambunctious imps to attend to, he was happy to let me take over the writing and production. For each
issue I featured a counselor’s biography and personal opinions. I included a question-and-answer column for which I went around the bunks and tents asking people: What is your favorite activity and why? What meal do you like best? What was your most exciting moment ever at Chipinaw?

I sat in the O.D. shack for hours, writing articles, cutting the stencil with a typewriter, brushing on purple correction fluid when necessary, relishing its iodine-like aroma. Then I carried the finished product to the administration building, a cluster of offices at the edge of the girls’ campus, otherwise off-limits to boys. There I hand-cranked several hundred fresh-smelling sheets.

I loved being back in the normal world, watching
Chirps
collect at the other end as the rolling cylinder hit a stack of 8 ½ by 14 paper, transforming type, artwork, and correction wax into flawless pages.

I spent increasingly less time on my camp activities and more and more on the
Chirp
, and no one seemed to mind.

The improved newspaper was a hit. I made the question column idiosyncratic, asking things like: What is your favorite water fountain (of the three on campus—by the workshed, alongside the tennis courts, or at the stables)? What is the best stoop for Stoopball? The best roof for Roofball? Should Dave Hecht fire counselors publicly? And most dangerously, what do you think of Color War? I posed these questions to not only campers and counselors but anyone I could find—Abbey, Nurse Mary, and some of the zombies. I even did interviews with the zombies about their maintenance jobs—an asocial act that no one seemed to understand. “Why?” counselors asked in bafflement, as though these laborers in our midst weren’t real. Chipinaw’s class hubris had turned them into robots as well as zombies.

My high point was composing arty descriptions of our environs. My first was a portrayal of a thunderstorm: I recreated the colors and movements of the clouds, rain on roofs, rivulets behind the tents, different moods during and after. A number of counselors complimented me on my style, so I wrote another about sunset. After that, I depicted Silver Lake, then the night sky, using plenty of adjectives while relying on the office copy of Roget’s
Thesaurus.
I always closed with a statement about the great beauty of our camp. Soon the secretaries were requesting hundreds of extras to include in the office’s promotional mailings. What had begun as delinquent behavior had me in the service of management!

When Color War broke I was ready. An editorial declared the
Chirp
and its editor neutral. I printed lists of both teams (without my name) and announced that, for the first time, the newspaper would not suspend operations but instead publish an enlarged edition, reporting on
all
activities and keeping an up-to-date tally. Ignoring my assigned competitions, I ran around with a clipboard, gathering results and interviewing participants. My product was meant to read like
The Daily Mirror.
Even captains and pro-war counselors encouraged me—they loved the publicity.

I had no reason to think that the judges would approve of my defection, let alone show me the official scoresheet. “Ask Abbey,” shrugged Arnie, the chief arbiter, so I approached the head counselor in his cabin. He didn’t turn me away but, since he had not pronounced judgment on my neutrality, he was silent for a spell, then said that he’d consider the request. I darted back to my bunk before he could order me into battle.

That afternoon, without comment, Arnie handed me a copy of the day’s scores and point totals. I took it from him in awe, the first camper in my time at Chipinaw to view the sacred document.

By dinner my coup was complete: I was invited to eat (for the duration of the week) with Abbey, Nurse Mary, the doctor, and the judges at the center table. I sat there, a child on Olympus.

I had finally achieved neutrality.

After the final reading of the official score Abbey asked for a standing ovation for the editor of the
Chirp.
Both teams rose, clapped, and whistled.

Only with the passage of time did I understand my real accomplishment. I had transformed an intransigent reality not, as I once presumed, by willful rebellion, but by forging a role for myself within it—one that my rivals accepted because I valorized and affirmed rather than derided or dismissed them. At the same time, using the clichés of big-time reporting I parodied not only Color
War and its overblown rhetoric, but my own charade of superiority. I got other people to see themselves as competing … for what? … the Red and the Gray!—and thus brought irony and self-reflection to the gambit. And I was exposed along with the rest of them—the imperious renegade and self-anointed scribe.

In Second Form (otherwise known as eighth grade) I had courses on Ancient and Mediaeval History; an Earth Science class featuring astronomy, geology and meteorology; requisite English and Math; and Beginning Latin taught by Mr. Jurka, a fellow from Albania who warned, “If you do not study it will be too too bad for you—not for me, but for you.”

Our sunny yellow reader had an irresistible flavor and charm, as though I were entering the rebus of an extinct outer-space people. I was enchanted by strings of endings for nouns and verbs and vocabulary that bore English words in prior forms. It was by far the vastest cipher I had undertaken, plus these were not rank puzzles or juvenile games, they were codes at the scale of the Earth.

I memorized
agricola, agricolae …, porto, portas, portat …,
and the wonderful
hic, haec, hoc; huius, huius, huius ….
I translated sentences like “The man carried the water” and “The soldiers attacked the village.” When Daddy quizzed me, we sang out the
“arum”
and
“orum”
of the genitive plural together with gusto (those were his favorites too at CCNY).

In Earth Science I learned taxonomy of sedimentary, igneous, and metamorphic rocks and started a collection. After charging an illustrated field guide at Womrath’s, I bought a white scratch stone and magnifying glass at a hobby store. My best specimens were a piece of rose quartz from Central Park, a granite gneiss from a trip with Daddy to the Goldman (his main account in New Jersey), an amethyst cluster from Grandma Jennie, and chunks of dolomite that a school friend found at a quarry in Yonkers.

Rocks I couldn’t identify with confidence—most of them—I piled in a bag and hauled to a room marked “Private” next to the geology exhibits at the Museum of Natural History. With trepidation I knocked on the door. The guy who opened it was genial
enough to stop what he was doing, judge and correct my attempts at taxonomy, and show me how he arrived at the right names. Every few weeks I returned with a new batch for deciphering.

Meanwhile science class moved from rocks to clouds: stratus, cumulus, cirrus, and their crisscrosses: cirrostratus, cirrocumulus, and stratocumulus. With insider knowledge, the sky became paradoxically both more codified and more dreamlike, as I stared into its pantheon of dynamic billows and vistas. I took photos of each type, or my best hunches, and made a collection of skyscapes in a three-ring binder.

After our teacher, Mr. Kelly, told us that we could order daily weather maps for a small fee from a government address, I began a subscription that I retained for years, as I tried to predict local weather from front lines and temperature differentials, for any relatives who would listen (as well as all the following summer in the
Chipinaw Chirp
).

My mother was left speechless when a gigantic folded weather map began arriving every day in the mail. She disliked watching me examine the full-length instrument on the floor, so I hammed it up, running my fingers along rows of glyphs, as I decoded the various triangles, whorls, and other symbols, sometimes announcing my meteorological deductions to passing family members.

As with Dr. Fabian, she imagined I could be exposed to knowledge and gentrified without disrupting the status quo. I was only her moppet and clone. You would have thought that the maps contained plots against her, but then she never liked uninvited guests she couldn’t control.

When we studied planets of the Solar System and stars, Mr. Kelly showed us a movie about cosmic rays—energy, he proclaimed (with the reverence of a rabbi), that comes from the beginning of the universe and penetrates the Earth, passing invisibly through our bodies every day. Cosmic rays were responsible, he added, for the color of our hair and the freckles on a girl’s nose.

One day he brought in an old wire recording of actual particles howling. Our class sat in awe before the spooky warble—the stuff of outer-space comics coming off a thin strand of rapidly spinning
steel. The crackle and pop sounded like an alien dragon trying to speak. Its soundtrack evoked not just the origin of galaxies and stars but my oldest daydreams, for the source of my ship lay somewhere in that cryptic chatter.

Pasting Kodacolors and wads of cotton on a piece of cardboard, I assembled a cloud taxonomy for my first-term project. After carting the cumbersome object to school on the subway, I watched a more ambitious classmate arrive in a station wagon with his physicist father and the two of them tote a large wooden box up to Mr. Kelly’s room; it contained cotton strung on wires to make a 3D diorama of cloud shapes, showing how they developed by increments of wind, altitude, and humidity, each parameter labelled on a background grid.

An even more talented science buff launched a three-stage rocket and landed a satellite with a parachute on the baseball field. I can still picture how the missile shot out of its holder and vanished in less than a second, then the minute-long wait during which no one was sure what would happen. I had lost many less complicated plastic water rockets to covert landing sites and upper branches of trees. Finally a black dot materialized out of the empty blue and floated gently down, swinging its payload—a
tour de force.

At the other end of Pforzheimer’s second floor we entered the jurisdiction of Egyptians, Assyrians, and Persians, a classroom covered wall-to-wall with maps and photographs of antiquities. For homework I memorized names and dates of dynasties and battles and who invented what. I wrote my term paper on the Phoenicians: alphabet, trade routes, shellfish dye, and how their descendants in Africa were the Carthaginians of my Latin texts.

Mr. Hathaway added one full point to our final grades for every outside topical book we could prove we had read, so I checked out volumes on Picts, Anatolians, Medes, and Cretans, and, one by one, consumed them with the zeal of a science-fiction fan—these were archives of far-off planets with exotic customs and artifacts. After I passed oral tests on each ancient tribe and empire, respectively, my teacher took out his ledger and made a red check after my name. Soon I had five points, the difference between a B+ and an A-.

When we reached
Life on a Mediaeval Barony,
Mr. Hathaway told us to put our thinking caps on and come up with a project based on the book, so I hiked down Broadway, scavenging items from toy and hobby shops. I finally constructed a castle of balsa wood with a moat, knights and horses, little rubber farm animals, and ducks for its “mirror” lake. Like my cloud display, my barony fell short of some of the ingenious fabrications of my classmates, which included flowing water, battery-operated serfs and drawbridges, and tiers of ducks, some in midair with wings spread, others landing with feathers tucked in.

At winter midterms in the gym we would be asked to describe the birth of Christianity and the War of the Roses. Inspired by the oxymoron of a fracas of flowers, I had memorized intricate details of fifteenth-century campaigns between the House of Plantagenet and the Houses of Lancaster and York, the lives of Richard III and Henry Tudor, and the Battle of Bosworth Field. I got a clean A.

In fact, I spent much of that year memorizing. It was my trademark: at the window sill overlooking 96th Street with its ever-changing stream of traffic, alone on park benches, riding the subway, at restaurants while we waited for our food (filtering out family chatter). I kept it up while we trekked around the reservoir, a finger marking my spot in a book as I tagged behind them, reviewing my progress through conjugations and dynasties, expanding mnemonic chains item by item inside my mind.

I committed to heart the planets of the Solar System, their sizes, distances from the Sun, irregular verbs, verbs that govern the dative, the third and fourth declensions, ablatives of place and time, and chronologies of Old World civilizations. Each of these topics spun its own imaginal web, as I wove myself into their spells and embraced their grandeur. It was amazing my brain had that much space, but then I had once dreamed up and memorized an entire universe. The more I assimilated, the more I personified my topics. I began to sound like a bona-fide Roman historian and meteorologist.