New Moon (65 page)

PG jumped back in. “Reverend, the matter has nothing to do with Michael; it’s Michael’s parents who are making this decision. If you have anything to say, please address it to me.”

I could barely keep myself from interceding. Here was a man of stature and achievement: a minister, a marcher for civil rights. He was soliciting Michael’s legitimate opinion. He shouldn’t have to be subjected to bullying and rudeness. I turned to Bunny for help.

“I’m afraid what happens to Michael is his father’s decision.”

“Do you agree?”

PG was glaring at me as she stammered, then found a tack: “I’m sure Mr. von Hillshimer’s school is excellent, but I don’t think it’s for your brother.” Ostensibly victorious, my father decided to lighten the mood with a series of jokes about his experiences with “men of the cloth.” Reverend George kept any subsequent thoughts to himself. He remained unruffled and polite.

No matter how angry I had been at my father in the past I had always thought of him as a decent person at core, reliable when the chips were down, even after he beat me. Now I saw a willful, spoiled child—a smug, self-aggrandizing autocrat—ordering around a black maid and, under the thinnest sham of civility, flaunting his wealth. A part of Bunny was wed to this man, irrevocably. She was no help at all. As for what Michael might have wanted—that got lost in the shuffle; they didn’t care about him having a voice.

We made it through the meal without further embarressments. After dessert I accompanied George down the stone path through the garden toward his car. We were silent most of the way as my mind raced for something to say. “This place is a menace, my friend,” he finally offered. “Leave quietly and by stealth or it will cannibalize you.” Then he bent over and collapsed on the lawn. I didn’t know what was happening; I thought maybe he was sick. I started to run back to the house for help. Then I realized he was actually rolling in the grass laughing. I was simultaneously startled and relieved. He pulled his body up to its full height in metameres like a giant cricket. “You’ll have to pardon me,” he said. “I was holding all of that in.”

I smiled nervously as I assured him it was okay. I apologized for my parents and for bringing him there with false hopes. “They were worse than I ever imagined.”

“So it wasn’t a bad evening,” he proclaimed with unpredictable cheeriness, “because you learned something.” He took a few more steps and, as we reached his vehicle, turned back to me. With a hard stare he added, “Forgive me, Richard, but at my father’s house in Germany your father wouldn’t have been fed with the hogs.”

I heard him say it, shook his hand, and waved to him as he drove off. Then it sank in. He knew, as did I, that he spoke as a German less than a generation after Hitler. He had reduced my father to a farm animal. I felt the coldness of his glance. I was a Grossinger too. Would I have been fed (or even denied service) with his father’s hogs?

Yet another part of me met him in brutal assessment. My father was not just a grumpy clown; he was an irresponsible boor, even a thug—I had to know that by now. I stood, looking out over his Hotel, the glowing glass cupolas of the indoor pool and faux Tudor façades of guest buildings, an iconic skyline. For virtually my whole life I had deemed this place a paradise, a haven and sanctuary. I may have mocked it or decried its elitism and lack of social conscience, but I considered it an important locale in the universe.

Now I realized it was nothing. It was the cheap passing vanity of Jewish peasants, arrogant and graceless in their fortune, oblivious to the Wheel of Fate whose turning brought them to this perch and could crush them in a tick, even as it had crushed far greater dynasties and nations.

Bunny’s panics returned big-time. She lay in bed trembling, grasping at the end table, the headboard, her pillow, anything. Then she tossed the pillows away and clutched the bottom sheet so tightly I thought it would rip. She was sobbing.

“Paul,” she cried to her husband, “I’m useless. Have them put me out of my misery.”

He indicated I should leave.

He wouldn’t let me see her later. “Not after the damage you’ve
done. I
told
you two to stop talking. You just upset each other. She has enough problems as it is.”

A doctor came from New York and ordered her to be hospitalized. My father announced she would be “incommunicado.” “Indefinitely,” he snapped, as I watched her being bundled off into the Hotel car.

What did I feel then? Hard to say. Numbness, fury, relief I had escaped a similar predicament unscathed…. Transitions paralyzed me. At moments like this I turned into Martha, my mother’s alienation and narcissism my default state too. That quashed any nascent sympathy or tenderness. What I felt mostly was defiance. And selfish regard for my own survival.

This wasn’t my family, it never had been.

A week later I heard that Bunny’s “cure” was to be shock treatment followed by two months of hospitalization. Meanwhile PG had stopped talking to me. He didn’t seem to know I existed. Whenever he passed me he looked away. On one occasion, though, he stopped to acknowledge my presence with Emma and the Mets in the living room, asking, “How’s my communist son?”

“Okay, I guess.” I was moved to tears by this backhanded revival of his affection.

“What’s the score, are they winning for a change?”

Emma took up the volley: “They’ze havin’ a fine night, Mr. G.”

Just before I left for college—when I was most alienated from him, and he from me—he called me into his office and told me he had a surprise. I racked my brain for what sort of riddle this was. “Go down to the front of the Main Building,” he resumed with a deadpan grin. I would not have guessed in a million years. As he watched from his window, the head of Traffic handed me the keys to a small yellow car parked at the entrance. “It’s yours apparently,” the guy declared. “Ford Mustang.”

I had never heard of the model, but it was a cool-looking, racing-car-like object.

“You won’t be monopolizing the JG anymore, I guess,” my father yelled down.

I packed it for Amherst with my jugs and plastic tree, cans of
twilight-blue paint, a discarded stained-glass lantern from the Nightwatch, and a bright lemon Mexican blanket I had bought in Greenwich Village. I loved the car’s new bowling-alley smell and the way the miles climbed into their first hundreds as I drove into Massachusetts. This was a magnificent, unwarranted gift.

I spent the days before school painting the walls of my room indigo. I made a temporary couch in the corner by draping my sunny coverlet over a mattress. Then, with screwdriver and electrical tape I put in an overhead stained-glass fixture by trial and error—my first light. “City boy no more,” I thought, picturing Mr. Borrig and Ramon there watching.

My aesthetics startled Marty when he arrived. “But I guess it’s okay. It’s, well, uh … different. I can live with it, I think. It looks a little like an oasis at sunset.”

As a junior I had to declare a major. English was the only practicable option left. In order to catch up on credits I signed up for seminars on Yeats, Faulkner, and Sixteenth-Century literature, plus a writing class, this one at Smith with a visiting novelist named Stanley Elkin.

Lindy called me as soon as she was back, and I sped over to Laura Scales. She sprang downstairs, vibrant and bubbly. We stared at each other; then she said, warily (as Lisa), “Hello, kiddo.”

We smiled, kissed quickly, and walked outside. I pointed to the car: yellow baby with a red, white, and blue LBJ/USA bumper sticker.

“What! They just gave that to you?”

I nodded, grinning.

“I hope it doesn’t spoil you,” she said.

I gave her a look of—how could you think such a thing?

“We can’t repeat last spring,” she interjected after a while. “I’m in love with Jim.”

He had left his wife and, in a month, would be moving to New York to take a new job with an advertising agency. From then on she would be seeing him regularly.

“I’m not really right for you and, by pretending, I’m making it
hard for you to find an appropriate girl.”

“How do I fail?”

“I have no way of making it sound nice. He’s so much older. He’s a man.”

“What am I?”

“Not yet a man.”

“Can you wait?”

“It’s you who can’t wait. You think you’re in love with me now, but you’ll find so many nymphet girls who will fall at your feet you’ll forget I even existed. I don’t want to be around for that.”

“I won’t do that,” I insisted.

A cat came out from a yard and wound around her legs. “Maybe if I had a cat, I wouldn’t need to get married. You want to arrange that?” Girls were so mercurial and unpredictable. To me this was dead serious stuff.

After dinner I lingered in the car outside Laura Scales, asking perversely if she had slept with him. She avoided the question (“None of your business”), but I persisted, until she said of course she had. Long after she had gone upstairs I sat there in my funk, unwilling to start the car.

I was at Smith each week for my writing class, so sometimes Lindy and I went to lunch together. Many of our exchanges were playful and low-key, but I had lapses into solipsism. One time, I berated her for her taste: Who would go out with a bourgeois reporter from a second-rate newspaper, some guy who would leave his wife and kids for a college girl—plus a job in an advertising agency of all things? She defended herself in a letter:

For two weeks after that I kept away, not calling or visiting, trying not to think about her … until, one day, walking from the parking lot to my class, I passed her riding her bike and waved cheerily. She looked at me, burst into tears, and sped off, a kelpie on tires.

“She must care,” I thought, “I must be special to her.”

With the graduation of the seniors ahead of us and the entry of a new sophomore class we were upperclassmen, no longer the greenhorns of Phi Psi. Tripp was back, but not as a member. He had dropped out of school, and his family wasn’t paying any bills. He had an old credit card that still seemed to work, so he would fill my car with gas and I’d give him cash. He lived in the woods east of Amherst in a cabin with that other renegade Eric the Rat. From there he was casting a new play.

His Porsche had fallen into disrepair, so, throughout that fall, I picked him up on the dirt road and drove him to his auditions with actresses. “I knew it was worth cultivating you, Grossinger,” he said. “You’re a man of compassion.”

Schuy returned as Scotty with a full mustache. I rarely saw him. Focused on building up his grades to apply to graduate school in psychology, he worked hard all week and on weekends drove into New York to see Dona.

“I’ve got to make every moment count,” he told me in a moment of rare volubility and candor. “I’ve got no more moves to spare.”

I was relieved to not be there yet.

My course material seemed to corroborate the summer’s vision—the alchemical metaphors of the sixteenth-century poets, the mind-flow through
As I Lay Dying
and
Absalom, Absalom!,
the lunar pulses of William Butler Yeats. Amid cricket songs and linnet’s wings, I drank from the fountain of
“I will arise and go now, / and go to Innisfree”
while imbuing myself with Faulkner’s rhythms and themes.
An omniscient voice spoke from beyond Miss Rosa, Quentin, and Charles Bon—perhaps Faulkner himself:
“who even at nineteen must have known that living is one constant and perpetual instant when the arras-veil before what-is-to-be hangs docile and even glad to the lightest naked touch if we had dared, were brave enough (not wise enough: no wisdom needed here) to make the rending gash …”

This was not only vaguely but
precisely
my life, the sort of precept I needed in order to act—brave enough, no special wisdom needed, the arras-veil hanging quite docile and even glad to my lightest naked touch, if only I dared.

Absalom
’s valiant lyricism struck at my heart; it bore my sense of peril, of withheld apotheosis, of dark and coiled ancestry:
“the prisoner soul, miasmal distillant, wroils ever upward sunward, tugs its prisoner arteries and veins and prisoning in its turn that spark, that dream which, as the globy and complete instant of its freedom mirrors and repeats (repeats?, creates, reduces to a fragile evanescent iridescent sphere) all of space and time and massy earth…. ”

At nineteen I too was living a constant and perpetual instant, careening before a mystery within another, striving for words where there were none, trying to give voice to a fleeting oracle, to dash my own breakwater syntax upon the fog-ridden lagoons.

Then there were higher churches sounding more ominous calls.
“And what rough beast,”
warned Yeats,
“its hour come round at last / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”

I had the tarot matrix, but I needed a personal article of faith, something to tie my acts of soothsaying to the boy on 96th Street with his gift of a saucer. I required a different dream now, a more anchorable spaceship. Like Bridey, I needed a church with a human confessional and a priest to put Fabian and the Hierophant on a common wavelengths. Otherwise I was far adrift in my own labyrinth.

For years since my Horace Mann pals had posed Jung as a less colonialist alternative to Freud, I had been eyeing the black volumes of his
Collected Works.
When I first heard the name, I thought he was Chinese and imagined his texts as Confucian or Communist. Once I got who he was—none of the above—I tried to deduce what
manner of symbols might be in them, how they could be different from those in the all-encompassing
Interpretation of Dreams.
“Symbols don’t have to be Western,” Bob Alpert had pontificated. “They can be Egyptian, Persian, African, even American Indian. No one made European logic king of the universe.” He insisted that Karl Marx and Carl Jung were reconcilable insofar as they both subverted the bourgeois belief system.