New Moon (41 page)

I had missed the sheer enormity of existence. Physical reality was manifesting spontaneously, and it was pulling me away from the abstraction I had honored as Horace Mann.

Kids pushed past one another in the hallways of Tillinghast Hall, mindless and rude. Seniors were still manipulating the tin men in the lounge when Chuck stopped me and read a poem about Donald Duck. Brief and silly, it was exactly right. “What’s with you?” he asked.

“I’m trapped in the Six of Cups.”

“Go ’way, breeze,” he said. “Go back home.” I knew that that was his antidote to life’s malaises—avant-garde minimal, faux light-hearted—but it wasn’t mine.

“Don’t you like breezes?” I played along.

“Yes, but I was thinking of it at the time, and it came.” He made a silly face. “What’s in
your
brain?”

“How funny and insane this place that makes me come day-in, day-out, won’t ever leave me alone.”

We walked around the track. Aimlessly I kicked cinders. I remembered times I lay on this field studying devotedly before this or that class. In my mind I heard and still honored Mr. Metcalf’s rendering of Virgil’s onomatopoeia,
“Magno cum murmure monte.”
Oh, to be in such fealty and wonder again! But the feeling with which the memory left me was already as ancient as my life.

I had intended once to reclaim everything by simple narrative—therapeutic confessions and autobiographical prose—but even Kingsley Ervin knew I had lost the thread (the labyrinth as well). I was telling my story from mere habit.

“Just because you were so successful with it,” he proposed one afternoon, “doesn’t mean the style will last forever.” Our class was filled with ambitious younger kids already imitating me, and I was trapped between jealousy at their success and weariness with the whole affair. “You need to dig deeper.” But what was inside me was hollow and intangible; it had neither a plot nor a name. Its feeling recalled my phobia of the dungeon stairs. In childhood when I felt this way I panicked; now I could tolerate the sensations, but they made me mournful beyond words.

I put aside what I had come to call “the novel” and wrote a science-fiction tale, about a man who unsuspectingly took an office elevator past the penthouse into higher dimensions; another about a Cheshire Cat Hunt on a distant world (and hunters who developed sympathy for their telepathic prey); then a fictional narrative through the mind of a child named Joey. I read them to the class under maples on a day so muggy we were allowed to take off our jackets and ties. Branches brushed against the stones of Tillinghast, the air a nectared sponge. I felt lethargic, brittle. Chuck’s tarot cards lay in the grass, awaiting a poem. Flowers fell from sky. I was marking time.

Every Senior in Honors English was required to give a speech to
the whole school, but each year a few escaped for lack of enough chapels. Four of us were yet to go when the final slot was being delegated. “Any volunteers?” Mr. Baruth asked. All year I had made myself invisible at selection time, and now there was but one small window of jeopardy. In an interlude of attempted anonymity, slinking in my chair, I suddenly recalled a feeling I had had once as I sowed my baseball cards through Central Park.

This speech was not a thing to be dreaded. It was a chance to meet my estrangement head-on, to call out the shadow life I was leading. My hand shot up, to the amazed relief of three classmates.

Most chapel speeches were topical and neutral, a historical account, an analysis of a scientific problem, summer travels in Europe, but I dug deeper, as Mr. Ervin had advised, and found exactly what I wanted. On the appointed day, I sat on stage beside Dr. Gratwick. I was going to spill the beans!

My confidence lasted until my name was called.

I rose dizzily. “Richard Grossinger” was a fiction, the thing they called me; it wasn’t who I was. But then who was this whirlpool of notions?

Standing at the podium I feared at once that my resources were too shallow. I looked at a sea of faces, Rodney and Keith somewhere among them, and almost lost it. I stumbled in a false start, and then began for real.

I described the long years of work leading only to a world vast beyond comprehension. Without naming anyone I portrayed Rodney’s bluster and described attitudes toward girls in an all-boys school. I alluded to my “idols” and intimated how I feared falling in love with boys.

I certainly had everyone’s attention—half in empathy, half in horror of what I would say next. I spoke my final words with a calm precision:

“How did we get here? How did I come to this difficult moment at the end of Horace Mann? I think back, and I am a little boy in a noisy playground. My nurse pushes me on the swing, up and down, in sun and into shade. I am lying in bed having sneaked back from the movies one night at camp to hear some wild, long-since-gone
fastballer named Bob Wiesler try to win his first game of the year against Washington. The swimming counselor heaves the lemon-line over my head. I swim after, grab it from the water, and throw…. I remember a TV show, a comic book found on the beach, men on beds of spikes, tortured in steam showers, unable to change their fate. I remember listening to Allie Reynolds pitch and Walt Dropo get a hit in the second game of a doubleheader on a car radio so long ago. I am standing by the road on the last day of camp, waiting for my father to pick me up. I am only a baby, and warm summer light shines on rotten apples beneath the trees. The world goes beyond us into things we cannot imagine. It is already too late, and I am about to become someone I don’t even know. This is my moment to say goodbye, for all of us.”

I ended by quoting Robert Penn Warren:

“Were we happy because we were happy or because once a long time back, we had been happy? Was our happiness tonight like the light of the moon which does not come from the moon, for the moon is cold and has no light of its own but is reflected light from far away.”

A gulp of silence … return to the velvet chair beside Gratwick, then the applause, like the gathering rustle of my first Chipinaw rain.

I had finally performed my
bar mitzvah.
I had preached the only Isaiah in my heart.

Now I was ready to face the consequences. I made an appointment with Mr. Clinton and, at the end of the next school day, climbed the twisting stairs to his citadel. As I edged to the door I saw him sitting on the master’s throne, playing with his belt a notch out from his paunch, smiling and glowering intermittently.

I announced my presence. He got into character quickly, snarling, “To what do I owe?”

I confessed at once that I had fallen way behind. He sat bolt upright in the chair.

“You, my star pupil? You dare to tell me this. You whom I trusted. This is horrible, Dickie.”

“I’m sorry, sir. I just don’t understand what’s happening to me.”

“Sorry, shit! You’re going to be a damn sight more than sorry.” His face changed like the sun passing through clouds. “You were one of the best I ever had. Dickie, you were like silver plate. Now what I see is silver plate covered with shit!”

“I tried—”

“I thought you had some depth to you, but I was wrong. You’re all surface, there’s nothing inside.” A pause. “You let me down.” He sat there in silence, his head bowed. When he looked up at me, his voice was so soft it was almost inaudible. “What have you been doing when you haven’t been working in my class?”

“I’ve gone to a few hockey games. I’ve been following baseball. I went out … with a girl.”

“Girls!” he shot back. “Are you like all those other shits that sit there in class with their erections?”

I was shocked. “No, sir. I mean—” Why would he even say such a thing?

“Shut up. I’m talking to you. Would you betray my course?”

“No sir.”

“Well, then you better catch up, dickhead!”

I started to respond.

“That’s it, you shallow shit. Meeting adjourned.”

Clinton was more than I could handle, and the impact of our session was instantaneous. I went home, got out the history book, and fled my ogre chapter after chapter, well into the next morning. I studied continuously until I was ready to take the Advanced Placement with a clear conscience. No all-star performance like at midterm, but at least I got by.

In truth, my situation was less perilous than I imagined, for I was goofing off only by comparison to prior standards. I felt truant not because I was playing real hooky or at risk of failing classes but because I was uncomfortable with my own being. I was like a creature undergoing metamorphosis, a pupa molting and awaiting a hit of new DNA. I couldn’t conduct larval activities anymore, but they were deeply enough ingrained that I carried out their injunctions autonomically. I maintained a credible grade point average, a drop-off from between A- and B+ to between B+ and B. Except for Clinton my apostasy went unnoticed. I got my “cum laude”
at graduation, as our official valedictorian briefly referenced my speech, then dispatched us to the winds.

On the last day of Horace Mann, Mr. Metcalf never let up once from his fury of translation. Not a hint of requiem after five years of meetings together, not a token of fare-thee-well sorrow. When the bell rang he said, “You’re all good boys,” and we left. Math class ended with cheering and hoots, English with a lecture on good study habits in college. Clinton’s class was the last; he greeted us with a scowl and said, “Take out a piece of paper and write about the period between the First and Second World Wars.” Then he broke into a big belly laugh. He was still laughing as we scurried down the hall, dismissed without a meeting.

One week later I left the gym after the math final, my last, strode from the sawdust into the full sun of the afternoon, where it had been all day and was now decaying. The flowers were painfully yellow. They had waited six years for my first day of freedom, but I had grown old and wanton in the process. Now freedom was just a rumor of a childhood that had abandoned me. The air was sodden as mud. I felt mainly its weight. I collapsed under the subway fan. Where were my classmates? I was inexplicably alone after years of train camaraderie. I changed at l68th Street and got off at 86th. I had an hour left before my last session with Dr. Friend, so I went into the Park.

It was already summer there. Mica twinkled from pavement. My other lives were scattered about: the Hares and the Hounds, the orange-drink man with his waxed cylinders of nectar, Bob hitting fungos, long-dead squirrels and pigeons. These were severed from me by something opaque yet palpable. The world then was an agony, a terror without reconciliation, a melancholy beyond knowing, but it was simpler than it would ever be again. I thought once that growing up would help. I thought that I would find the traumatic moment, the clue in the embers. Now no such thing existed. In their place were a Hierophant and a Fool.

I studied in order to become learned, to know the hidden truth. But vastness and ambiguity stretched to each horizon, and dandelions
everywhere bid me back to Oz as they locked me out of Oz forever. I wanted to somehow capture this errant intimation, to justify myself, to declare the stubborn reality.

I was writing for my life.

I could say the Horace Mann adage in Latin:
“Magna est veritas et praevalit…. ”
—“v” pronounced always as “w.” Our alma mater’s gaining verses were
“Men come and go, / stars cease to glow, / But great is the truth and it prevails.
” It was an embarrassingly overwrought refrain, but it had a stealth epiphany. “Stars” took it outdoors and made us a celestial choir addressing something larger and more abiding than schoolwork: the enigma of Creation beyond the birth and death of suns; beyond anything taught, though everything intimated, in our lesson plans—in the denouements of Donne, Keats, and Melville; in the formation of cirrus clouds, the sound of cosmic rays, the waning of the Middle Ages. We were singing for our lives too.

Wordsworth wouldn’t have composed the hack lines of Bob Ackerman, Class of ’53, but he would have understood the extravagance of their allusion. I could recite his more elegant phrasing by heart as Baruth had once required: “
There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream, / The earth, and every common sight, / To me did seem / Apparelled in celestial light…. ”

I had become a scholar in the Grecian temple of my dream; I had reduced its arcana to ordinary events. Now
(“Though nothing can bring back the hour / Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower…. ”)
I wanted to return to childhood and make the journey again.

I began to compose an account of the walk home out the east side of the Park to the drugstore—recalling how, after Sunday baseball with Bob and Jon, I was so thirsty then I imaged waterfalls of pink lemonade and bubbling brooks of yellow lemonade topped with white lemon foam, until the soda-man poured it onto crushed ice, and I sat there sipping, there being nothing else of me. On the way home Jonny and I ran down the block catching make-believe fly balls, leaping beneath awnings, diving at the pavement, my left hand brown with Neatsfoot oil in which we adoringly drowned our gloves.

I thought of the days at Bill-Dave when we finished playing and would sit under the cherry blossoms with Ranger and the Bully.
I pictured the sweet sticks of pastel-colored chalks with which we drew our trails, and how we crossed the Park for hours in feint and counterfeint. I remembered Halloween at Pelham, when they hid the pumpkins, and I found the third and last one buried in a hole in a tree, packed in with dirt and leaves. But they wouldn’t let me keep it as my prize because it was such a good hiding place they were sure I had peeked. Again and again on the way home Bert called me a cheater; yet all I had done was make a brilliant deduction. God, they were terrible—I walked among them in a daze.

I remembered the tombs of the Egyptians at the Museum and how we dashed through them, fleeing ghosts. I thought of how augural it was when the woman with absolutely white hair arrived to unlock the door of her bookshop and I stepped into its antique aroma and knew just what volume to pluck from the Hardy Boys row in the back…. And Gene Woodling’s homer falling into the upper deck.