If someone cheated at any game, or incurred the group’s wrath in any way, the rest of us gave him, or her, Indian burns: we wrung a bare arm with both hands close together till the skin chafed. Worse—reserved for practically capital crimes—was the dreaded but admired typewriter torture, which we understood to be, in modern guise, an old Indian persuader. One of us straddled the offender, bared his or her breastbone, and lightly tapped fingertips there—very lightly, just where the skin covers the bone most closely. This light tapping does not hurt at all for the first five minutes or so.
We were nice kids who rarely resorted to torture. We played Red Rover, a variation on Prisoners’ Base called Beckons Wanted, and Crack the Whip. Everything else, and parts of these games, too, smacked of Indians. By day, Pin Ford and I played at being Indians straight out. Her parents were also young, and she was my age, an only child; they lived two doors up. Pin’s real name was Barbara. She was tan and blond, sturdy, smooth of skin; she was agreeable and quick to laugh. Her courage and her flair for the visual arts hadn’t yet formed. She was content now to stalk the neighborhood and knock over the odd streetcar.
As Indians, Pin and I explored the wooded grounds of the Presbyterian seminary at our backyards. We made bows and arrows: we peeled and straightened deadfall sticks for arrows, and cut, stealthily, green boughs to bend for bows. With string we rigged our mothers’ Chesterfield cigarette cartons over our shoulders as quivers. We shot our bows. We threw knives at targets, and played knife-throwing games. We walked as the Indians had walked, stirring no leaves, snapping no twigs. We built an Indian village, Navajo style, under the seminary’s low copper beech: we baked clay bricks on slate roofing tiles set on adobe walls around a twiggy fire.
We named the trees. We searched the sky for omens, and inspected the ground for sign.
We came home and found our mothers together in our side yard by the rose garden, tanning on chaises longues. They were both thin and blond. They held silvered cardboard reflectors up to their flung-back chins. Over their closed eyelids they had placed blue eye-shaped plastic cups, joined over the nose.
THE ATTIC BEDROOM where I drew my baseball mitt was a crow’s nest, a treehouse, a studio, an office, a forensic laboratory, and a fort. It interested me especially for a totemic brown water stain on a sloping plaster wall. The stain looked like a square-rigged ship heeled over in a storm. I examined this ship for many months. It was a painting, not a drawing; it had no lines, only forms awash, which rose faintly from the plaster and deepened slowly and dramatically as I watched and the seas climbed and the wind rose before anyone could furl the sails. Those distant dashes over the water—were they men sliding overboard? Were they storm petrels flying? I knew a song whose chorus asked, What did the deep sea say?
My detective work centered around the attic, and sometimes included Pin Ford. We filed information on criminal suspects in a shoe box. We got the information by hanging around the Evergreen Café on Penn Avenue and noting suspicious activity.
One dark, rainy afternoon when I was alone, I saw a case of beer inside the trunk of a man’s car. If that wasn’t suspicious, I didn’t know what was. I was lurking just outside the drugstore, where I could see the Evergreen Café clientele without being seen. I memorized the car license number, of course, as anyone would—but my real virtue as a detective was that I could memorize the whole man, inch by inch, by means of sentences, and later reproduce the man in a drawing.
When I came home from the dark rain that afternoon I walked through floor after floor of the lighted house, wetting the golden rugs and muttering, until I got to the attic stairs and the attic itself. There I repaired to a card table under the square-rigged ship. I wrote down the suspect’s car’s make and license number. I wrote down my stabs at his height and age, and a description of his clothes. Then I turned on the radio, opened a cheap drawing tablet, and relaxed to the business of drawing the man who had stepped out of the Evergreen Café and revealed a case of beer in the trunk of his car.
By accident I drew a sloppy oval that looked like his head. I copied a page of these. Paying attention, I marked off some rough ratios: the crucial intervals between eye sockets, headtop, and chin. Unconsciously again, I let my hand scribble lines for features. I sat up to play back in my head certain memorized sentences: he has a wide mouth; his mouth corners fall directly beneath eyes’ outer corners; forehead is round; ears are high, triangular. My dumb hand molded the recurved facial masses and shaded the eye sockets for its own pleasure with slanting parallel lines. I sat enchanted and unwitting in a trance.
What will the weather be?
Tell us, Mister Weather Man.
The radio woman enunciated her slow, terrible song. She sounded her notes delicately, as did the idiot xylophone that preceded her. A wind was rising outside. Across the attic room, the blackened windows rattled. I saw their glossed reflections on the pale walls wag. The rain battered the roof over my head, over the waterlogged ship. I heard the bare buckeye boughs hitting the house.
I was drawing the head. I shut my eyes. I could not see the man’s face eidetically. That is, I could not reproduce it interiorly, study it, and discover new things, as some few people can look at a page, print it, as it were, in their memories, and read it off later. I could produce stable images only rarely. But like anyone, I could recall and almost see fleet torn fragments of a scene: a raincoat sleeve’s wrinkling, a blond head bending, red-lighted rain falling on asphalt, a pesteringly interesting pattern in a cordovan shoe, which rises and floats across that face I want to see. I perceived these sights as scraps that floated like blowing tissue across some hollow interior space, some space at the arching roof of the rib cage, perhaps. I swerved to study them before they slid away.
I hoped that the sentences would nail the blowing scraps down. I hoped that the sentences would store scenes like rolls of film, rolls of film I could simply reel off and watch. But of course, the sentences did not work that way. The sentences suggested scenes to the imagination, which were no sooner repeated than envisioned, and envisioned just as poorly and just as vividly as actual memories. Here was Raggedy Ann, say, an actual memory, with her red-and-white-striped stockings and blunt black feet. And here, say, was a barefoot boy asleep in a car, his cheeks covered thinly with blood. Which was real? The barefoot boy was just as vivid. It was easier to remember a sentence than a sight, and the sentences suggested sights new or skewed. These were dim regions, these submerged caves where waters mingled. On my cheap tablet I was drawing round lips, suns, fish in schools.
Soon someone would call me for dinner. But I would not come, I suddenly realized, and I would not answer the call—ever—for I would have died of starvation. They would find me, having slid off my chair, half under the card table, lying dead on the floor. And so young.
In the blue shoe box on the card table they would find my priceless files. I had written all my data about today’s suspect, drawn his face several times from several angles, and filed it all under his car’s license number. When the police needed it, it was ready.
Privately I thought the reference librarian at the Homewood Library was soft in the head. The week before, she had handed me, in broad daylight, the book that contained the key to Morse code. Without a word, she watched me copy it, pocket the paper, and leave.
I knew how to keep a code secret, if she didn’t. At home I memorized Morse code promptly, and burned the paper.
I had read the library’s collection of popular forensic medicine, its many books about Scotland Yard and the FBI, a dull biography of J. Edgar Hoover, and its Sherlock Holmes. I knew I was not alone in knowing Morse code. The FBI knew it, Scotland Yard knew it, and every sparks in the navy knew it. I read everything I could get about ham radios. All I needed was a receiver. I could listen in on troop maneuvers, intelligence reports, and disasters at sea. And I could rescue other hams from calamity, to which, as a class, they seemed remarkably prone.
I knew that police artists made composite drawing
s of criminal suspects. Witnesses to crimes selected, from a varied assortment, a stripe of crown hair, a stripe or two of forehead, a stripe of eyes, and so forth. Police artists—of whose ranks I was an oblate—made a drawing that combined these elements; newspapers published the drawings; someone recognized the suspect and called the police.
When Pin Ford and I were running low on suspects, and had run out of things to communicate in Morse code, I sat at my attic table beside the shoe box file and drew a variety of such stripes. I amused myself by combining them into new faces. So God must sit in heaven, at a card table, fingering a heap of stripes—hairlines, jawlines, brows—and joining them at whim to people a world. I began wondering if the stock of individual faces on earth through all of time is infinite.
My sweetest ambition was to see a drawing of mine on a newspaper’s front page: HAS ANYBODY SEEN THIS MAN? I didn’t care about reducing crime, any more than Sherlock Holmes did. I rather wished there were more crime, and closer by. What interested me was the schematic likeness, how recognizable it was, and how startlingly few things you needed to strike a resemblance. You needed only a few major proportions in the head. The soft tissues scarcely mattered; they were merely decorations that children drew. What mattered was the framing of the skull.
And so in that faraway attic, among the boughs of buckeye trees, year after year, I drew. I drew formal, sustained studies of my left hand still on the card table, of my baseball mitt, a saddle shoe. I drew from memory the faces of the people I knew, my own family just downstairs in the great house—oh, but I hated these clumsy drawings, these beloved faces so rigid on the page and lacking in tenderness and irony. (Who could analyze a numb skull when all you cared about was a lively caught glance, the pleased rising of Mother’s cheek, the soft amused setting of Amy’s lip, Father’s imagining eye in its socket?) And I drew from memory the faces of people I saw in the streets. I formed sentences about them as I looked at them, and repeated the sentences to myself as I wandered on.
I wanted to notice everything, as Holmes had, and remember it all, as no one had before. Noticing and remembering were the route to Scotland Yard, where I intended to find my niche. They were also, more urgently, the route to the corner yard on Edgerton Avenue, to life in the house we had left and lost.
Hadn’t I already forgotten the floor plan of that house where I had lived for seven years? I could see a terrifying oblong of light bend across a room’s corner; I could see my mother talking on the phone in the dark stairwell, and Jo Ann Sheehy skating at night on the iced street, and the broom-closet door opening to reveal—the broom. But who could stitch these ripped remnants together? I could no longer conjure up the face of Walter Milligan, the red-haired Irish boy I had chased up and down a football field—could no longer remember his face because I had neglected to memorize it.
Noticing and remembering everything would trap bright scenes to light and fill the blank and darkening past which was already piling up behind me. The growing size of that blank and ever-darkening past frightened me; it loomed beside me like a hole in the air and battened on scraps of my life I failed to claim. If one day I forgot to notice my life, and be damned grateful for it, the blank cave would suck me up entire.
From now on, I would beat the days into my brain. Every year, every month, I vowed this vow in a different form.
But the new scenes I tried to memorize with the aid of sentences were as elusive and random as the scenes I remembered without effort. They were just as broken, trivial, capsizing, submerged. Instead of a suspect’s face I saw red-lighted rain in front of a car’s taillight. Instead of the schoolyard recess scene I loved, the dodgeball game I tried to memorize at one moment, and then at another—my friends and I excited and whooping—I saw a coarse cement corner, and the cyclone fence above it, and only a flash of dark green school uniforms below. Instead of my sister Molly just starting to walk I saw the smocking on her blue dress, and her stained palm. These were torn and out-of-focus scenes playing on windblown scraps. They dissolved when I tried to inspect them, or dimmed, or slid dizzyingly away, like a ship’s stern yawing down the dark lee slope of a wave.
BUT HE SAID UNTO JESUS, And who is my neighbor?
And Jesus answering said, A certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell among thieves.
And he said unto him, Who is my neighbor?
But a certain Samaritan came where he was.
And went to him, and bound up his wounds, and brought him to an inn, and took care of him.
And he said unto him, Which now, thinkest thou, was neighbor unto him that fell among the thieves?
And he said unto him, Who IS my neighbor?
And Jesus answering said, A certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell among thieves.
Who IS my neighbor?
Then said Jesus unto him, Go, and do thou likewise.
This was my “Terwilliger bunts one.” This and similar fragments of Biblical language played in my head like a record on which the needle has stuck, played at the back of my mind and moved at the root of my tongue and sounded deep in my ears without surcease. Who is my neighbor?
Every July for four years, Amy and I trotted off to a Presbyterian church camp. It was cheap, wholesome, and nearby. There we were happy, loose with other children in cabins under pines. If our parents had known how pious and low church this camp was, they would have yanked us. We memorized Bible chapters, sang rollicking hymns around the clock, held nightly devotions including extemporaneous prayers, and filed out of the woods to chapel twice on Sundays dressed in white shorts. The faith-filled theology there was only half a step out of a tent; you could still smell the sawdust.
We met all sorts of girls at camp. There were a dozen girls from an orphanage, who had never been adopted. Among these I admired an older girl named Liz—a large-framed, bony girl with dry blond curls and high red cheekbones, who wore a wool lumberjack shirt. Every Sunday night, gathered in our bare old rec hall of a chapel, we children could request a favorite hymn if we could recite a Bible verse. Year after year, big Liz returned unadopted to camp and, Sunday after Sunday, requested “No One Ever Cared for Me Like Jesus.”
I had a head for religious ideas. They were the first ideas I ever encountered. They made other ideas seem mean.
For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul? And lose his own soul? And lose his own soul? Know ye that the Lord he is God: it is he that hath made us, and not we ourselves; we are his people, and the sheep of his pasture. Arise, and take up thy bed, and walk. And he said unto him, WHO IS MY NEIGHBOR?
Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord? or who shall stand in his holy place? He that hath clean hands, and a pure heart; who hath not lifted up his soul unto vanity, nor sworn deceitfully.
The earth is the Lord’s, and the fulness thereof; the world, and they that dwell therein. The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork. Verily I say unto you, that one of you shall betray me.
Every summer we memorized these things at camp. Every Sunday in Pittsburgh we heard these things in Sunday school. Every Thursday we studied these things, and memorized them, too (strictly as literature, they said), at school. I had miles of Bible in memory: some perforce, but most by hap, like the words to songs. There was no corner of my brain where you couldn’t find, among the files of clothing labels and heaps of rocks, among the swarms of protozoans and shelves of novels, whole tapes and snarls and reels of Bible. Later, before I left Pittsburgh for college, I would write several poems in deliberate imitation of its sounds, those repeated feminine endings followed by thumps, or those long hard beats followed by softness. Selah.
The Bible’s was an unlikely, movie-set world alongside our world. Light-shot and translucent in the pallid Sunday-school watercolors on the walls, stormy and opaque in the dense and staggering texts they read us placidly, sweet-mouthed and earnest, week after week, this world interleaved our waking world like drea
m.
The adult members of society adverted to the Bible unreasonably often. What arcana! Why did they spread this scandalous document before our eyes? If they had read it, I thought, they would have hid it. They didn’t recognize the vivid danger that we would, through repeated exposure, catch a case of its wild opposition to their world. Instead they bade us study great chunks of it, and think about those chunks, and commit them to memory, and ignore them. By dipping us children in the Bible so often, they hoped, I think, to give our lives a serious tint, and to provide us with quaintly magnificent snatches of prayer to produce as charms while, say, being mugged for our cash or jewels.
In Sunday school at the Shadyside Presbyterian Church, the handsome father of rascal Jack from dancing school, himself a vice-president of Jones & Laughlin, whose wife was famous at the country club for her tan, held a birch pointer in his long fingers and shyly tapped the hanging paper map, shyly because he could see we weren’t listening. Who would listen to this? Why on earth were we here? There in blue and yellow and green were Galilee, Samaria itself, and Judaea, he said—and I pretended to pay attention as a courtesy—the Sea of Galilee, the river Jordan, and the Dead Sea. I saw on the hanging map the coasts of Judaea by the far side of Jordan, on whose unimaginable shores the pastel Christ had maybe uttered such cruel, stiff, thrilling words: Sell whatsoever thou hast.
James and John, the sons of Zebedee, he made them fishers of men. And he came to the Lake of Gennesaret, and he came to Capernaum. And he withdrew in a boat. And a certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho. See it here on the map? Down. He went down, and fell among thieves.
And the swine jumped over the cliff.
And the voice cried, Samuel, Samuel. And the wakened boy Samuel answered, Here am I. And at last he said, Speak.
An American Childhood Page 12
