New Moon (27 page)

The last time I saw him he was strangely irritable, like a cop unable to budge his prime suspect during an umpteenth interrogation. He asked me if I had had any sexual fantasies. I bristled at the explicitness of his invasion and dismissed its insinuation by shaking my head. He kept at me as he never had before, as though somehow he knew this was his last chance to solve my case. “You must have had some,” he insisted, but I was tight-lipped.

Then he missed the next two sessions because he was called unexpectedly out of town. It was midterms of my second year at Horace Mann, and I didn’t pay much attention to the interruption. I was obsessed with studying, the moment of truth in the gym. I memorized so hard that by Sunday night I began to forget things. I told my mother I was going to fail, and she ordered me to bed.

“You know there’s such a thing as overstudying,” Daddy chimed in. “You want to be in fighting condition tomorrow, not all worn out from too much sparring.”

During each allotted two-hour span during the next week I drew on days of review and cramming, making a record of my partial mastery: the War of the Roses; cloud types; Latin to English, English to Latin; pristine integers extracted from quadratic jumbles. I pushed a pen until my fingers cramped. At the approach of the hour I rifled back to problems or questions I hadn’t be able to get and gave them a last desperate shot.

Abruptly a command halted us: “Put down your writing implements at once!” I felt a surge of relief, then headed home to study for the next one.

Two weeks later my grades came in the mail; they were all A’s except for a B in math. My mother was stupefied. She had no premonition of this happening and acted as though I had achieved the impossible. She was slaphappy on the phone, spreading the word to Grandma Sally and other relatives. She even got my father on the line, asking first, “Guess what Richard did?” in a tone sure to solicit, “What now?”

When he finally spoke to me he asked, “What happened in math?” That was meant to be funny too, but I didn’t laugh.

As a reward, my mother invited me to her office for a special meal after school on Friday.

I took the subway to 57th Street and walked to the East Side. I sensed her unsteady mood as she phoned downstairs for a sandwich and then led me by the hand into the conference room. “Something I have to tell you. Dr. Fabian died.” She planned this quick strike to avoid any clumsy dawdling. It was how she would have wanted to be told and I appreciated her diligence.

I felt a shock of surprise. It was hard to register such a big reality or its meaning. Then I thought confusedly back over the last weeks. “Was it on his trip?” I wondered.

“He never went on a trip. He died the evening of the last day you saw him. He had a sudden stroke. I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want to disturb your studying.”

Now I adjusted to the fact that he had been dead for three weeks. Morbidly I thought back to our session and felt a flurry of guilt. I didn’t imagine that I had caused his stroke by my intransigence, but
I knew I had failed him nonetheless. I had failed the person who meant the most to me. And now I was alone.

On the way home in the back of a cab with my mother, my tears faded into an uncomfortably impassive breeziness that said: no more prying into fantasies, no more subway treks downtown, plenty of extra time for homework.
Maybe even no more fears.

I had the illusion I could make it on my own, and I told myself a dark, shameful secret—that I wouldn’t miss him. Then I locked it inside my heart. I went bowling with Eddie Schultz the next day, accepting a rare social date because my mother said it would be good to put my mind on something else. I pulled off my best round ever, my friend a witness. Life was improving!

When I started to go to sleep that night I had nightmares. I saw figures tumbling off a tower atop a faraway mountain, disappearing into a chasm. Dr. Fabian was one of them, unable to help himself, falling, screaming too.

At another juncture of the dream his bodiless head came to the window of my bedroom; I cried out silently. His voice was everywhere. “See,” it said, “I can’t save anyone. I never could. None of it ever really mattered. Not even the symbols. Now I’m one of the dead too.”

Then I saw something else. His bones were in a garbage can. He was pale and rotted. He lay in a pond face down. Fragments of his body rippled like cloth, wrapped around telephone poles. Something terrible
had
happened to him.

I woke, looked around the room, remembered where I was, and tried to go back to sleep. Every time I closed my eyes I saw the same tower, the figures closer and more human. Yet I felt that as long as they didn’t see me looking at them I was safe.

For years previous I had had a recurring dream of going to see another doctor, a dull, grouchy man whose ineptitude made a travesty of the session. It was always a relief to awake and remember good old Dr. Fabian. Now I encountered a live enactment of the dream. Two weeks after my mother broke the news, I took the elevator to a penthouse apartment overlooking Central Park West
at 86th Street. Its occupant was a psychiatrist named Maurice Friend whose specialty was teenagers. He had agreed to take Dr. Fabian’s one patient in his age range. The final decision, however, was to be mine.

This small, heavy-set man with a typical adult look seemed an unlikely replacement for my larger-than-life savior, not as banal and gross as in the dreams but a step in that direction. He didn’t seem anything like a wizard, let alone Honest Abe.

Yet there we were, the two of us in chairs, facing each other, talking about a relationship like some sort of business deal. I couldn’t focus on the issue at hand or take him seriously. All through the trial session—as he explained his method of working and opened his shirt to show me on his chest a scar from an operation (he was also vulnerable to death, he was saying)—I sat there contemptuous, imagining I would find someone more special. But then Dr. Fabian had stopped being a wizard long ago and, when the hour was over, the only answer I could think of was “Yes.”

At first Dr. Friend was able to squeeze me into his schedule only at six o’clock in the evening. I took the subway straight from school to his building and sat in the waiting room doing homework for two hours, sometimes (if I caught the early train) longer, while other patients, mostly surly, suspicious teenagers, came and went. At a table by the window I solved math problems, summarized history readings, and translated Latin sentences while the sky darkened behind the reservoir and lights kindled across town on the East Side, scenery as picturesque as it was allaying. It was as though I were in a mirador or castle, elevated and grand—at least not my cloying apartment. I felt superior to the delinquents and slobs who preceded me. They
looked like
dysfunctional dolts, mental patients from central casting—
I
was a well-dressed Horace Mann student who had actually read Freud.

I might have been in a library carrel too, for Dr. Friend and I maintained a code of silence. I wasn’t supposed to be there, so I wasn’t. He might sneak me the slightest glint of recognition while greeting the next patient; yet at my turn he welcomed me enthusiastically.

From the beginning he insisted I lie on the couch while talking
to him. I balked at being forced into the psychiatric stereotype. I had imagined Fabian and me as engaged in something more discriminating. Since in all our years he didn’t once ask me to use the couch, I had never considered its possible value. Lying down made Dr. Friend disappear into an omnipresence behind me. For weeks I dawdled there, re-narrating my stories as if on an empty stage, his voice inserting minor queries and redirects. I told him my dreams of the tower and the other incompetent doctors without letting on that I held him in their company. Then I ran off the version of my crisis that Dr. Fabian and I had collaborated on over the years.

When Dr. Friend finally chose to intervene at length his comments were unexpected: “You’re not as crazy as you like to make yourself sound. You’ve been in psychoanalysis from such a young age that you now think of yourself only in terms of your problems.” I turned to face him in the overstuffed chair by the horse-statue lamp. He smiled cheerfully as he picked up steam. “Dr. Fabian was obviously a great support and helped you through difficult years, but I think he underestimated you. He made you into a sick child, a helpless boy who needed that support all the time. You may have been that once, but you’re not anymore. I think it’s an interesting coincidence that right after he died—even though you didn’t know it—you got almost all A’s. Now you
can’t
go back to the excuse that you’re an invalid and nothing should be expected of you. You are going to have to perform at your level.”

He had little interest in my recollections and recitals of Nanny, Fabian’s fallback scoundrel. “She no doubt had an effect on you, but she’s not active in the present. I can’t do anything about the remote past or your mother’s behavior, but I can teach you how to react in the present in ways that don’t do you as much harm.”

As our sessions deepened he routinely cut off my stories. “You tell me about being afraid, but I don’t see you afraid. You tell me about your sadness, but you don’t act sad or cry. I want to know what’s happening inside you when you’re here,
now.
I see you day after day studying in the waiting room, seemingly with tremendous patience, but you are not a patient person. How do you control yourself? How do you create these rigid masks?”

He insisted on hearing my fantasies and daydreams. When I balked and tried to substitute my usual expurgations he wasn’t fooled. “Richard, I can’t do anything unless you’re here too. You’re wasting my time, your time, and your father’s money. I’m not prying because I’m nosy. I need to know what’s going on with you, not what you choose to edit out for me. I’m not going to be a second Dr. Fabian. I’m no friendly uncle.”

Yes, Dr. Fabian had been an ally, a buddy, and a magus, appearing at the brink of the dungeon stairs, leading me away from danger, then teaching me like a sorcerer’s apprentice. Dr. Friend was the doctor of my teenage years: hard-nosed, demanding, incisive. Much of the time I would lie there irritated and mum, staring up at photographs of shell-like Grecian artifacts. “What do you feel?” he would ask tiredly. The last patient of his day, I could smell the cooking odors of his dinner drifting in from another quarter of the apartment, forcing me to withhold that I considered him repulsive too.

His name was ironical. It was because Dr. Fabian was too good a friend that I became unable to confide in him. Dr. Friend I found harsh, almost antipathetic, yet I eventually told him the truth, all the ignominious and sordid things I had long withheld, the yearnings and enmities that put my innocence and integrity in doubt. In all the time at Dr. Fabian’s I never really looked at that stubborn boy with his outer-space adventures, pranks, and infatuations; now I did.

The spring of Second Form, I went out for baseball, but the fastballs petrified me and I had never seen a curve before, so didn’t know how to do more than lurch at them. I made occasional running catches, but I didn’t have an arm for the outfield. When tried at second, I booted grounders. I started only one game (against Riverdale when someone else was sick) and, facing a guy who threw faster than a batting machine, by luck I hit a line drive to the shortstop, a real coup when twenty-five of our twenty-seven batters struck out. I can still feel the electricity of my bat turned wand.

Most of the other players were from the suburbs so I rode the subway home alone or, sometimes, with one other kid. It was the first time that I experienced the divide between the athletes—jocks—and the so-called brains. Bill-Dave and Chipinaw had bred an ineradicable competitive spirit, and baseball was my game, but none of the intellectuals in my circle even thought about going out for teams. They operated in another universe entirely. My fellow players talked drinking and parties and I felt like a child beside them.

I had to admit, I wasn’t a real player, I didn’t belong there. But if I was no longer a left fielder or spaceship recipient, what was I?

Dr. Friend was right. It was hard to know what I felt because I almost didn’t feel it anymore. An ancient wistfulness hung over those years, protecting them like soft rain. I wasn’t harried by terror; I didn’t panic or feel the old amalgam of dread and hopelessness. I didn’t obsess about poisons or terminal diseases. I wasn’t phobic or hypervigilant. I wasn’t happy or sad. I was in a limbo of suspended
animation. And I didn’t probe too deeply, for I found only layers of recalcitrance and discontent.

En route home, I gazed out the window of the El before entering the tunnel at 200th Street. The world seemed to have grown even more vast and mysterious in my absence, all that time studying and memorizing. I watched a young mother, kids chasing a ball until a building blocked them, a cluster of men at a corner store, women hanging from windows shouting, wind dissipating through leaves … sun glinting off surfaces … a dark alley … a hobo with a dog … a Puerto Rican girl in a bright yellow shirt, long black hair, a face I couldn’t quite catch. Then the screech of wheels buried their images forever beyond swerving track. I yearned for something lodged inside the very depth and substance of the world. But intimations flipped by, not even like dreams.

Finals that year were my moment of truth, the only clear ultimatum on Earth. All May and June I studied into early morning hours every night. Latin was the most hopeful subject because I could at least translate the texts and explain their grammatical architecture. But Science and European History were bottomless, Algebra always on the edge of obscurity. I was not a math natural like most of my high-achieving peers; no matter how many problems I wrested to solution, I stared into the next bundle of numbers and letters like a Gordian knot.

For weeks beforehand I had the same nightmare in which I looked at my test and could decipher nothing, as though I hadn’t even attended the course. I still have such dreams. Chuck Stein, a classmate then who’s now a practicing Buddhist, tells me that fifty years of Zen and Tibetan meditation have not brought to an end his traumatic flashbacks of the showdown in the HM gym.

During those days Dr. Friend heard perfunctory dreams and petty frustrations. I not only lost all emotion, I forgot I existed. Course books and note binders subsumed my world, as I force-fed reams of minutiae into my brain. I was determined to learn
everything.
Grades had become their own vindication.

“A” was an ace in a deck of cards, a letter stolen from a sacred alphabet. I wanted to be defined by immaculate “A,” to feel at its
appearance a release of tension in my gut … its deliciously sovereign coils of anointing. All of us shared that ambition to some degree—Chuck Stein, Erwin Morton, James Polachek, Andrew Schloss, Bob Karlin. We clustered before and after exams, alternately competitive and empathic, compelled to the ceremony. We had accepted blind invitations into an arcane guild when there was no other—no other invitation, no other guild.

After finals I returned awkwardly to who I was, a person with vague aches and yens, not quite the performer in whose behalf I imagined I was toiling. Formulas and facts crumbled into aimless static as though the knowledge itself didn’t matter, its grade already in the unseen book. Only the imminent report card counted, a week to ten days down the road, an oversize envelope with the HM return address. I sat at my desk, listlessly crumpling obsolete notes and shooting for the far trash basket, collecting my misses and shooting again.

Arriving in a stack of mundane mail on the 6B doormat, the holy epistle coopted every prior essence. I could barely tear open the envelope, my arms felt so weak.

It was all A’s and high B’s—vindication! I was not only exonerated but free. Yet the sense of being on trial remained. Somewhere once I had committed a crime, perhaps a murder. It wasn’t the crime my mother held against me—it was much, much worse—something from another life. Nothing I did could atone for it, and now a judge in a wig was about to pronounce my sentence, to send me to prison for the rest of my natural life. I knew that incarceration because I had already lived its eternity in a stone cell, died there a madman. Who cared about “A” when once long ago I had failed the final exam of character and motive?

But where was it taking place? Where dwelled this cryptic court that arose in a dream beyond memory like some dank Romanian visitation?

A premonition hid in my background—an obscure, unnamed malignancy. Was I like Bridey Murphy?

I went to my annual check-up with Dr. Levine. I sat in his office, watching little kids build block cities on the floor. They were young
and protected; nothing had happened to them yet. I knew better. The muteness of that room masked a cataclysm, a white noise in which everyone went about their business as though we were invulnerable to what was at stake. Traffic roared by on the streets. One by one, the nurses called them in. Then me.

Was my heartbeat okay? Why did he listen so closely? Did he sense something Dr. Hunt had missed all these years? Why was he squeezing my belly again? Did he feel a lump? I watched his face for a clue. If he lingered anywhere too long, it was bad. If he passed too quickly it was bad too because it meant he already knew and was pondering how to tell me. But nothing came of it, nothing at all.

I strode into a boiling-hot city, vindicated again, almost light-hearted, disbelieving my luck. When had summer exploded, had so many flowers and branches bloomed so exorbitantly? I felt dropped into a future time and its elusive joy. The subway roared under grates, releasing a sultry stench and recalling my unknown destiny. This was an overripe Eden. But who was I now that doom was in remission and I had an option to live?

Not really. The Chinese were suddenly threatening to invade Quemoy and Matsu. President Eisenhower vowed to defend the islands with everything America had. The world was on fire. I was sure I would never make it to Grossinger’s alive.

Bridey customarily turned on the news every hour, from 7 a.m. till bedtime. Now I attended to its chimes, the chant of the global announcer: Quemoy and Matsu, Red China and Taiwan, an inevasible collision. As I glanced nervously at newsstand headlines, every screeching sound and whine of machinery startled me: back on red alert—something terrible, worse than terrible, was about to happen. It was blatant, screaming from newspaper headlines, all of us at stake.

The testing of air-raid sirens sent me searching for a clock face to confirm it was noon. Give or take a minute or two for imperfect gears, it was always reassuringly twelvish. Whew! My heart gradually stopped pounding.

I couldn’t understand why no one else was concerned—but then
no one else had ever been concerned.

One day the sirens went off in the late afternoon. I thought—fire engines, no! Noon, no! Then this was it!

I stood there in the apartment listening to their unabated drone. Would I hear the bombs first or see the light? Would the buildings ignite and crumble? My heart was beating so hard I could almost not bear its weight. But another part of me seemed to be laughing, as if to say, “This is all crazy. This makes no sense at all, none of it.”

I tore to the radio and turned it on. I expected to hear the warning tone, but there was music, station after station … music and voices.

Now I listened to the sirens with a different attitude, one of mockery and defiance … even though somewhere the bombs were still mounted, their missiles ready…. The keepers of doom were imperfect, hysterical. And this time
they were wrong.

For two weeks that June I worked for Paul Zousmer at the Grossinger New York office. I typed his press releases, sorted and cleaned his collapsing files back into the 1920s, and ran errands. Each day at lunch the gang of us went to a nearby luncheonette and ordered soup and slices of the meat special with fries and the vegetable of the day.

I finally earned $150. In a festive mood PZ accompanied me to Photo Fair. Charlie was waiting. He brought out a sealed box, cut it open, and took the camera from its foam shell and handed it to me. I held the cold, sleek-smelling metal to my eye and focused on people outside the storefront. No longer confined to a fixed lens, I tested the delicate registers of its dials, watching fog crystallize into moving faces and bodies. Across the counter, de Luise pointed out singer Phil Everly with his black pompadour. He was examining, then buying a Yashika with his brother. I pretended to take a picture of him, depressing the button at the highest speed and listening to the fine ping of the shutter. Kids at the Horace Mann camera club had said a two-thousandth of a second was pointless, a waste, but it made my Minolta special, like Bob Turley’s fastball. When I took out my wad of bills, Charlie laughed. “No charge,” he said.

I didn’t understand.

“Your grandfather already paid for it. Harry Grossinger. He
wanted it to be a gift from him.”

Now PZ was laughing too. “He found out you were working in the office, so he decided to surprise you.”

I was astonished. Grandpa Harry, while generous, had never been interested in anything I did or said; he was a cartoon figure, acting out a benignly irascible role. Now I saw him in a new light: a cagey old coyote not missing a beat, not letting on—and he had chosen to sponsor my photography!

I spent half of my cash on a light meter and then hurried home with my treasures, testing the viewfinder on lights in the subway tunnel, people walking dogs along the park, silhouettes of water towers, cherry blossoms, an altocumulus sky … the whole superb world.

A week later, Grandpa’s new driver, Ray, picked me up for the summer, first Grossinger’s, then Chipinaw. But instead of going directly to the Mountains, he stopped in the Bronx because he had tickets from Ingemar Johansson for his second heavyweight bout with Floyd Patterson. Johansson had trained at the Hotel, and Ray had become pals with him in the course of ferrying him back and forth to the City.

I wanted to get out of the nuclear target zone, so attending this fight was just one more obstacle. What if the attack came while we were dallying at a needless affair? But I was also involved in wanting the Grossinger’s fighter to smash my brother’s ballyhooed guy. I knew he rooted for Patterson only because I had befriended Johansson at the Hotel. He wanted to see
me
lose.

In Spanish Harlem on our way to Yankee Stadium, the Caddy broke down and, while I stood in the street alongside the open hood—Ray working feverishly underneath—an old man approached me and offered to start our vehicle by pouring liquor into its gas tank. He reached for the cap before Ray dissuaded him. A crowd began to gather.

I wasn’t afraid. World War III was scary; the judge in his wig was scary. This was an interlude in a strange place about which I was curious. What did it feel like to stand in streets beyond the El, breathe their soot, their pizza-popcorn air, be among their ripples
of activity, gaze at the habitants up close? Twilight fell.

Suddenly Ray got the engine running. He was dripping sweat as we gunned out of there. I was laughing to myself at what a great story this would be. “Liquor for the engine!” Michael would roar. And then he’d dance about, making it into a song.

I missed all the political nuances. I was too young and credulous; everything noteworthy or odd was either a tall tale or a prank.

PZ occupied the seat next to us. We had barely settled when he shouted, “No!” Patterson had sent the Swedish champion sprawling across the canvass. I was shocked. Jonny had won. But we found our way to the car and headed north to the Catskills. I was alive, en route back to paradise. Time would go on, a while more.

At lunch the next day a pleasant man at the family tables introduced himself as Steve Lawrence; he said that he was singing that night in the Terrace Room. When I realized who he was, I told him how much I liked his version of “The Banana Boat Song.” He was pleased that I had heard of him. “I never turn down praise,” he added, “but don’t you think Harry Bellafonte has the real claim on that one?”

“I like yours too. You make it a different song.”

“Well, I did my homework. I researched the roots. ‘Hill and gully rider’ is my own touch. Gonna come and hear me tonight?”

“Yep!”

Then he began humming,
“Comes the light / And I wanna go home.”

We were in a discussion about the song’s meaning and symbols in general when he cut me off, “Gotta go do a sound check, but let’s continue tomorrow, same time, same station, buddy. Breakfast?” And so we did.

That summer at Chipinaw, Jay, Barry, and I graduated to the tents; we were Seniors. Our habitats were large wooden decks on which beds were set. Flaps of canvas arranged on ropes and supported by poles formed a pyramidal canopy above each provisional floor. When I was younger I was relieved to be in a safe and spacious bunk, but a tent was a box kite of shifting breezes, sunlight, and flaps, a vagabond perk for recently admitted adults—we had earned our flaps like a sea captain his sails.