The Violet Hour (36 page)

One morning at the hospital, Maurice told Lynn that he had a dream about her: She is lying on a sofa draped in white sheets, and behind her is a wall painted with an elaborate Dickensian Christmas scene. There is a vista of a small town covered in snow, a horse-drawn carriage. It is a wonderful peaceful scene.

Lynn pointed out that Maurice hated Christmas—he once said in an interview, “I hate this fucking holiday so much I can't tell you”—and he hated snow, but he said it was a beautiful, comforting dream.

Maurice really did hate and fear snow. Everyone else would talk about how pretty it was, with the house nestled in powdery
drifts, but he would call snow “white death.” He was worried he would have a heart attack and not be able to get to the hospital and would die. When it snowed, he and Lynn would bundle up and go outside and get the snow off the roof, which he was afraid would collapse from it, and brush it off the bushes, which he thought would die from the weight.

So this comforting dream about a snowy scene was a dream about “white death.” The feeling of Christmas, which had always alienated and irritated him with its foreignness, its exotic exclusion, had turned sweet.

It is interesting that comfort would come to Maurice via a painted wall. He didn't dream the Christmas scene itself but a painting of the scene; his imagination would render this comfort in a backdrop, like the opera backdrops he labored so intensively over for years. His subconscious was still painting.

At around five, Lynn came back to Maurice's room from getting coffee, and he looked strange. There was something strange about the way he was holding himself. He couldn't move one whole side of his body. Lynn knew immediately that something was wrong and called the doctor. It turned out that he'd had another stroke.

When he was going in for the MRI, Maurice looked scared. Lynn felt awful. She asked their doctor, who was by now his
friend and a familiar face, if he could go in with him, but that was against protocol. She hated for him to be alone.

Maurice had seen peaceful deaths. “When my father was dying, he'd dwindled—he had the body shape of a boy—and as I held him, I noticed that his head had become bigger than the rest of him and was rolling back like an infant's. Death at that moment was like going to sleep. ‘Shhhh, it will be all right.' It's what you'd say to a feverish baby, except that he was dead.”

After that, the scene took a manic Sendakian turn when Maurice wanted to see his father's penis. Without thinking, he began to undress him. His brother, alarmed, said, “What are you doing?” and Maurice said, “Papa's penis is where we come from. Don't you want to see it?” “No!” his brother shouted. Here you can almost see Mickey, sliding naked down the giant milk bottle in
In the Night Kitchen
, crowing, “Cock-a-doodle-doo!”—millions of children shocked, titillated, riveted.

As a child, Maurice was obsessed with the Lindbergh-baby kidnapping. He was three and a half when the baby was kidnapped, and he heard the news blaring from the radio. He thought, if this rich, Gentile, cherished blond baby could be taken from his house, what hope could there be for a poor sickly Jewish kid like him? He remembered the teary voice of the baby's mother on the radio, pleading with the kidnappers
to rub camphor on the baby's chest because he had a cold. The news story merged with some apprehension already forming in his head: Babies could be lost, could vanish, could be stolen, could die.

He would later draw the Lindbergh baby, who did in fact die, in one of his more alarming books,
Outside Over There
, where a baby is stolen by faceless goblins; they creep through a window, like the Lindbergh kidnappers, and replace the baby with one made of ice. In a scene mimicking Maurice's own childhood, the baby is left in the care of her older sister, Ida, while the mother gazes indifferently off into the distance. She is very clearly, but for mysterious reasons, not responsible for the infant. Though the baby is stolen by goblins and then returned, the mother remains deeply, eerily disinterested.

In adult life, Maurice became very interested in obtaining one of the kidnapper's macabre little ladders, which were sold as souvenirs during his New Jersey trial. He went to great lengths to obtain it. When he finally got it, though, in 2009, he wasn't sure what to do with it. He wasn't really comfortable owning it, and kept it in the shed.

His own theory about the Lindbergh case was that the baby was killed by his father and the entire kidnapping story was a cover-up. He privately told friends that it was shaken-baby syndrome. What obsessed him, then, was not a story about a child stolen out of the window of his family's home but a terrible hidden act of family violence.

He reveled in a letter a little girl wrote to him about
Outside Over There:
“ ‘Why did you write this book? This is the first book I hate….I hope you die soon. Cordially.' A letter like that is wonderful. ‘I wish you would die.' I should have written back, ‘Honey, I will; just hold your horses.' ”

One day, when he was around six, Maurice was playing ball with his friend Lloyd in the alley behind his house, laundry strung from the windows above their heads. He threw the ball too high, and Lloyd missed and it bounced and rolled into the street. Lloyd ran after it, and Maurice watched as a car hit him and he went flying through the air.

Seven decades later, in a television studio, he could not talk about Lloyd easily. His voice thickened. “I remember Lloyd like flat out in the air.” He held his arms out to the sides to demonstrate. “It could be a distorted memory, but I see the arms and the head; he's flying.”

Right here is the act of imagination: He has turned dying into flying. The brutal or traumatic thing he had witnessed becomes another thing, less brutal and traumatic, ambiguous.

Maurice was sure it was his fault and ran upstairs and locked himself into his room; even later, when Lloyd's mother sat with him on the stoop and told him it wasn't his fault, he was still sure it was his fault. He kept in his head the picture of the car hitting Lloyd and the dead boy flying through the air.