New Moon (37 page)

I thought back to Samuel Coleridge’s Ode on “Dejection,” elucidated in English class a few months earlier—1802 England, addressed to an unavailable woman, Sara Hutchinson:
“May all the stars hang bright above her dwelling, / Silent as though they watched the sleeping Earth!”
—the couplet as cogent on the playing fields of Kenmont as the sheep-filled meadows of the Lake Country, nor disparate from Bobby Darin crooning,
“Somewhere beyond the sea, / She’s there, waiting for me…. ”
Or those Everly Brothers in their pompadour mummery,
“Let it be me…. ”
The mystery woman, the mystery man, the mystery mission, the unknown witness, the Beloved: “A Nocturnal Upon S. Lucy’s Day,” “Ode on Intimations of Immortality”—all our lives our inner selves reach out for such an assignation. And it could not have been stated more clearly by that least likely garage band:
“Can’t you see I came to the party / ’cause I knew that you’d be here.”
Welcome to a festival universe—fast-moving clouds over an untended world.

On the radio back at the bunk pinch-hitter Johnny Blanchard swinging two bats in the on-deck circle (in my imagination, Joe Glazer hunched in his box recalling my act of heresy and divination)…. Johnny Blanchard, third-string catcher, hard drinker, sacred bum, came up to the plate and ripped a grand slam in the bottom of the ninth to pull out a game against the Red Sox. And in that epiphany Joe Glazer made a blessing and sent it my way with his greeting and compliments, “You nailed it, kid!”

And from farther off in time and space:
“The voice I hear this passing night was heard / In ancient days by emperor and clown.”
No kidding, John Keats.

The Yankees chased Detroit all that summer while Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris piled up unprecedented numbers of home runs, both ahead of Babe Ruth’s 1927 record pace. For much of July I
listened on my radio. Then I heard that George, the chubby middle-aged steward of the kitchen, was a fanatic Yankee rooter and had a TV in his room beside the dining hall, the only one in all of downtown Kenmont. George was notoriously unapproachable and surly, plus he despised the wise-ass waiters in my bunk, but
I
wasn’t them. After a few weeks he must have discerned my legitimate interest (and non-asshole status), for he invited me to his “palace,” as he called it. Thereafter I became a regular guest. I stretched out on the floor while he sat on the edge of the bed in his undershirt with a beer. It was barely more than a oversized closet, but at summer camp a TV was a towline into civilization, and Johnny Blanchard rewarded us with a string of unlikely hits.

George and I would keep the silence of each other’s company, discussing only crucialities of the game except for his occasional commendation: “You’re a real mensch; how do you stand living with those shit-faced creeps? Tell me that!” He didn’t expect an answer, that was my virtue.

I remember how instantly alert we were whenever the Tigers’ score was announced.

“Whitey Herzog has just homered for Baltimore in the first.”

“Make it two on,” George said.

“A runner on base, so Detroit’s down 2–0.”

“We’ll take it.”

One evening the older kids visited the nearby Shakespeare Theater in Stratford for a performance of
Macbeth.
In my wildest dream I would not have imagined … there was Keith in the crowd, the real boy. I had never talked to him, but now it was simple. I mean, we were the only two HM kids there. We chatted like any schoolmates about how each of us had gotten there, then … good luck and goodbye. Dr. Friend was right; Keith was simply another person. The eidolon had been my creation.

Summer reached its apex in mid-August. No dawn fog—at seven the sun was already a blazing ball. Lawn-mowing tractors perfumed the air, grasshoppers launching and landing in the distance. I had
broken my middle right finger playing catch with Fred—we were pitching to each other and he was showing me his curve—now the splint was finally off. I hadn’t held a ball in three weeks, my longest abstinence. Even in the daunting heat, I wanted to play. So I found my brother, and we collected a sack of hardballs. I ran to center field. He swung from the backstop.

I had the rhythm that day, throwing my body in the path of sinking liners, tumbling over and over with the ball.

“You’re a prophet!” Jon shouted.

It was true; the day was jubilant, auspicious beyond reason.

We kept changing places, batter and fielder, until we were both soaked and exhausted and lay silently together in the grass. Then we parted. He headed toward his bunk; I veered to the coffee shop where I bought a cold orange.

“We’ve sold a lot of these today,” the boy said as he dropped a cup over the bottle. I guzzled down a brief torrent. A fan turned ineffectually, as flies buzzed around rolls of gummed paper rich with flies. Over in the corner Asher was lying on his belly next to a tall, pretty girl I hadn’t noticed before. He had his shirt off, and she scratched his back while throwing out witty asides. “What’s this?” … stopping and scraping a little. As he strained to look up and around at himself she sassed, “Oh, nothing, son,” and went on drawing in curlicues on him. She was so quirky and droll I couldn’t keep my sideways glance from her. She had reddish brown hair, and there was something distinctly Keith-like about her—the theatricality, the playful intelligence, the melodic, showy voice.

Once again, an image of Pan had captured my wandering attention.

Through the remainder of the summer, though I never approached her, I watched Jill. She was spunky and brash, more than a match for Asher. I would overhear him talking excitedly to Eric about her: “She French-kisses! She stuck her tongue in so far I thought I was going out of my mind.”

Eric could barely contain his lust and envy.

The last week of camp I was standing with George in the kitchen before lunch, poring over the day’s stats. Maris had hit two more
homers; we knew that, but had just discovered, to our chagrin, the Tigers won their late game. A voice from behind me said, “Oh, don’t tell me Maris hit another.”

Jill moved in between us like a pro to scan the box scores. “My favorite player’s Wally Moon. I want to see how he’s doing. There. Not bad, not bad!”

“He’s okay,” I added unnecessarily.

“He’s better than okay,” she shot back. Her eyes were pale, transparent; she had on large earrings, and her hair was arranged in a complicated French twist. George went on studying the page as though the phenomenon wasn’t there.

The next day the boys played the girls in the annual softball game in which the boys had to bat left handed (or right handed if they were lefties). Jill was the Yogi-catcher with a mask on. She fell to her knees and deftly grabbed an outside pitch on one bounce as I batted. Then I fouled one back; she threw off her mask, dove, and just missed it. Her lipstick and busty polo shirt notwithstanding, she was a player.

After Kenmont I returned to Grossinger’s where storm clouds were gathering. Jay and his brothers had been absent for years, and now Jay’s parents, with Barry’s father as their lawyer, were suing my grandparents over abuses of management. Aunt Bunny told me that they were justified. “But what can we do?” she lamented. “Your grandfather owns all our shares, and he insists on acting on his whims without consulting his partners. When he dug the first hole for the indoor pool he was warned that he would hit reservoir pipes going into New York City. He said nobody was going to tell him where he could dig on his own property. He got one giant geyser, and it wasn’t oil!” She flipped two fingers and her thumb in the air. “So then he had to fill in the hole and pay the fine too. Now he’s off on some other hare-brained scheme and your father hasn’t the guts to stop him.”

Uncle Paul had entered a more cantankerous phase—cursing the union organizers, bawling out guests for not being dressed properly in the dining room. And everyone in the family, as usual, was
choosing sides.

But Grossinger’s was still my haven. I played ball on the staff field with Jerry, watched the Yankees on TV, shot rolls of Kodacolor, and wrote about the summer. As Aunt Bunny and I came dripping into the cabana one afternoon from a swim I told her about Jill and, en route through the lunch buffet, she responded with an insanely flagrant idea: “You should call her and ask her out.”

“I don’t even know her,” I protested.

“She’d be flattered.”

“Sure she would…. Anyhow, I don’t have her phone number or address.”

“Call the camp office, dummy. What have you got to lose? If she doesn’t want to go you’re back where you started.”

“But what should I invite her to?”

“You know the answer to that. Invite her to a ballgame. Get tickets from the office.”

When she made the suggestion I was sure there was no way I would do it. She said it too facilely, without any appreciation for the outrageousness of such an act. After all, she hadn’t viewed the consequences of my mere dance with Tina.

But she had opened Pandora’s box. It was a simple, gutsy plan, and it had the advantage of avoiding another unrequited fantasy. It was also vintage Grossinger’s—bold, daffy, overflowing with hope.

I evaded the gadfly for days, but it wouldn’t let me off the hook. Finally I phoned the Kenmont office and asked for Jill’s number. That was hard enough to accomplish gracefully, without bolting and hanging up while the secretary was searching.

Until the following morning I kept it in my pocket like a stolen gem, trying to enjoy it before it was rendered void. Then at nine-thirty I dialed quickly so that I wouldn’t stop myself. I listened to the line ring and ring, mesmerized, every few seconds jolting myself to cognizance of what I was doing, preparing for her voice … and when it continued ringing I was totally relieved.

I grabbed my novel and headed to the pool. After the legendary buffet—turkey, tongue, blueberry tarts—I hiked to the staff field and joined a group of Puerto Rican staff hitting and fielding fungos
while they shouted in Spanish.

I played at being the kid from Grossinger’s that whole day, as I pondered my daring gambit. Observing myself in the role took nothing away. It was a great all-time ploy.

I waited until evening. The phone rang, twice, three times … suddenly a click … and her voice.

“Hello.”

“Hi. This is Richard Grossinger. Do you remember me from camp?”

“Oh yes … and how are your Yankees?”

“Okay, I suppose.”

“Do you go to ballgames now that you’re out of camp?”

“No. I’m not in New York….” And eventually: “How would you like to go to the Yankee-Cleveland game this Saturday?”

“Hmmm, this Saturday? Let’s see … I’m busy. How about next Saturday?”

“They go on the road Monday.”

“Oh, no! I’d really like to.”

“There’s one other chance. How about October 2nd? It’s a Sunday, the last day of the season. And who knows how many home runs Maris may have by then.”

“True, true…. Sunday the 2nd is fine with me.”

We set a meeting place and time (her apartment at noon) and I hung up the phone. I went tearing out the front door and ran around the house twice before rolling into the tomato patch. I lay there in the leaves, thanking them for being what they were, the sun too.

“I told you it would work,” Aunt Bunny said.

“It’s because she likes baseball.”

“I wouldn’t bet on it.”

I returned to the City with new hopefulness, and my final year of Horace Mann began. I had Virgil, Honors European History, Honors English, Mr. Ervin’s writing seminar, and advanced algebra.

My mother and I seldom spoke beyond trifles. As the years had amassed in their unruly stack, we developed a protocol, a tacit truce. After all, I was getting A’s and B’s at school and acting more or less
like a gentleman. It was clear that I had done something unforgivable once—
that
could never be pardoned—but she couldn’t keep lambasting me for the same crime, so we based our relationship on a presumption of my guilt as we performed a masquerade of amnesty: a stilted cordiality of house arrest. We hung on its fulcrum, two trapeze artists, unable to look at each other, yet, while falling away, stretching the tension between us to the boundary of our existences.

She was my mother, which Aunt Bunny, however wonderful, could never be. There was something about this woman, her scarred, craggy landscape, that grounded my life in hers and made her inalterably real. She got there through grief and pain, she was joyless and spiteful; yet I imbued her even as I fought her. I can’t remember her ever hugging me with good will or saying a kind word without an agenda. But she touched bottom. Through her I gauged where my own depth and texture went, how I was put together. Without her I had no ambit or shape.

Richard Grossinger, son of PG, was a flicker in the dusk. Richard, son of Martha Rothkrug Towers, was the cartilage of my being.

Her interest now was in how good a college I could get into, not because she pictured my leaving home to attend but because that was the next stage in the hoax we were perpetrating, my imitation of the career of her brother Lionel whom we had seen all of
once.
So that fall my father drove into the City with my adopted brother to take me on a trip to look at New England schools. Aunt Bunny had hoped that such exposure might inspire Michael to do his homework. It turned out to be a slapstick affair. With Uncle Paul’s one good eye keeping us (mostly) on the road, we crossed various mountain ranges, winding among Williamstown, Amherst, Dartmouth, and Middlebury. Michael and I kissed the ground each time on our arrivals, to PG’s chagrin.

With their bucolic quads, ivy-covered masonry, and rolling fields, these schools were on a scale as much above Horace Mann as Horace Mann had towered over P.S. 6. I could hardly believe I would be not only taking classes at one of them but living there. Something else I had never contemplated: it was the single payoff for all my hard work and high grades, the privilege to apply to elite institutions.
Otherwise, studying for A’s was a dead-end game.

I knew that my grades made me a strong candidate, but my father decided to prove one of his choice maxims: “It’s not
what
you know, it’s
who
you know.” At Amherst, which had the most majestic campus, he arranged for a prominent alumnus, a priggish shrimp of a Catskills attorney, to meet us at the Admissions Office and make his presence known. At Dartmouth, for a similar reason, we ate lunch with the football coach.