Lily died of a heart attack in the early spring of 1946. Thomas, married now to the young and lovely Ellen Hurley of Buffalo, was suddenly free to do whatever he wished with his money. His tastes, though grand by Mannville standards, were not extravagant, and he was not the type to waste money on useless luxuries. Instead, he acted upon a plan that had been brewing in the back of his mind for some time. Farming corn and vegetables had always seemed boring to him. He was therefore going to liquidate his assets, import ostriches from Australia, and begin an ostrich ranch. It couldn’t fail, he told himself. He was just the sort of far-thinking man who could pull it off. He was, after all, a millionaire and a war hero, and nobody would dare contradict him. In fact, he envisioned it as the start of a growing trend in America. He’d eaten ostrich meat once while visiting Australia on leave and found it delicious. Mannvillians would soon follow his example, simply because he was who he was, and then he would have a hold on the ostrich market that would be unshakable. And he wouldn’t do this on a small scale, either. All his land would be converted to ostrich ranching; all his attention would be focused on it.
Straightaway Thomas imported two thousand ostriches from Australia at phenomenal cost and hired seventy-five workmen to fence in the entire farm. Thomas and the rest of Mannville waited expectantly for the arrival of the birds. A week went by, then two weeks, then a month, then three. Then came a telegram; nearly half of the ostriches had died aboard ship en route to America. Of those that survived the trip, another half died promptly after their arrival, victims of various New World diseases to which they had no immunity.
The rest of the ostriches milled about disconsolately after their arrival in the huge area Thomas had ordered fenced. There they remained until they discovered the fences, which they promptly jumped over, never to be seen again. Thomas had told the workmen of his plan, but none of them had ever seen an ostrich before, and they had no idea of the true size or strength of one. Most of them had the vague impression that an ostrich was a very tall chicken. The fences were built accordingly, and the ostriches found them no serious obstacle to their freedom.
That was the end of that. After only three months, Thomas found himself almost bankrupt, and with not a single ostrich to show for it. What was worse, however, was that his reputation among the people of Mannville had plummeted. People in town laughed in his face. Outraged farmers barraged him with phone calls—rampaging ostriches were ruining their corn crops, and they shot them on sight. Ostrich sightings began to be reported in the neighboring towns of Springville, Angola, and Hamburg, and one even came from as far away as the tiny mountain town of Ashford Hollow, nearly sixty miles distant. The Mannville Megaphone carried weekly articles on the subject for the next year, with such headlines as MANNVILLE’S MANIACAL MILLIONAIRE MISSES MARK and GIANT CHICKENS INVADE NEW YORK! Finally, however, the whole affair came to be known as the Great Ostrich Fiasco of 1946. It is, I believe, still mentioned in history classes at Mannville High School as an interesting and colorful piece of local legend.
Broke, depressed, and suddenly friendless, Thomas retired permanently to his farmhouse. My father, Eddie, was born in late 1947; soon after, Ellen Hurley, whose name I know only from reading the wedding announcement on microfilm in the Mannville Public Library, returned alone and forever to Buffalo, having discovered belatedly that her love had been for the Mann fortune and not for Thomas Mann himself. My grandfather never mentioned her name to me, and Eddie barely knew of her. All of Thomas’s energy was focused on his son. It was only through Eddie, Grandpa knew, that the Mann name could begin its long and gradual ascension from the muck into which he had accidentally plunged it.
Everything had to be sold to pay off his debts. The three main Mann farms, including land and equipment, were publicly auctioned. The land was mostly purchased by developers eager to participate in the postwar frenzy of prosperity. Everywhere across the country, servicemen were returning home and reproducing at a fantastic rate. It was as if they were making up for lost time, time wasted in France and England and the Pacific and everywhere else the long and miserable war had been fought, time wasted in fighting when they should have been carousing in the sack with their wives. These servicemen had money now, and good jobs, and they demanded homes. Within four years, by 1950, the three thousand acres had been subdivided, parceled, built upon, and sold, and where once fruitful fields of wheat and corn and grapes had stretched impressively across the landscape, there were driveways with shiny new cars parked in them, women hanging laundry in backyards, and quiet streets filled with children on bicycles and scooters. A new town existed, and all because of a lousy idea my grandfather had that never came to fruition.
“This is all my goddamn fault,” he told me, as he had told my father, waving at the same neighborhoods. “If I’d been born with a brain, none of these suburban dipshits would be here. Better yet, I should have been eaten by sharks instead of that poor Phillip Neuberg. I bet he would never have been so stupid as to invest in ostriches. He was an engineer. Engineers are smart.”
My father entered kindergarten in 1952. His academic career from that moment on was brilliant, according to my grandfather. Like me, he could read phenomenally well at an early age, and as a result he skipped the first grade and was promoted to the second. In middle school he began playing football and baseball, as well as working a part-time job at Gruber’s Grocery. “He was never home after he turned thirteen,” said Grandpa, and he did not add that he didn’t blame him. Who would want to stick around the dying remains of a once-great empire, as its once-great emperor sat glumly amid the ruins, sipping straight Irish whiskey, shunning all human contact?
Eddie also learned to fight: “Kids used to tease him, on account of his old man was the laughingstock of the town,” Grandpa said. “So they would say things to him and he’d pound on ’em till they took it back. That business didn’t last long. He was one of the strongest kids around, and after someone got a taste of him once, they usually didn’t come back for more. Then he started getting noticed on the field. By the time he was in high school, everybody forgot who he came from. He was just Ready Eddie. His name was in the paper every week or so. Girls used to call here all the damn time and lose their nerve before they could say anything. God, he was something.”
He was more than something; he was a Mann. His natural tendency toward greatness could hardly be suppressed by a mere lack of money. If anything, it made him shine more.
“We don’t have any money,” Grandpa would tell me. “We don’t have any friends. We just have this house, and you have me. And I have you. But by God we still have more than any other family in this town, because we have Mann blood. And don’t you ever forget it.”
“I won’t,” I promised.
And I haven’t, because it’s my story too. Even though it didn’t happen to me. If I am to tell my own account, the story of who I am, how I came to be, and where I’m going, then the other stories need to be told too. Not necessarily in order, of course, but where they fit. Time is a river, but sometimes rivers run in circles. They eddy, they create backwaters, little forgotten pockets of shoreline where things persist in an unchanged state, far removed from the frantic pace of the deeper middle. It’s a good idea sometimes to allow yourself to drift into these spots, just floating and spinning, and forget about things for a while.
3
My Early Childhood Continued; the Kind of Man My Father Was; the Munchkins; Grandpa Has an Accident
My father’s old bedroom was on the second floor of the farmhouse. It had one window facing north, toward the Lake, which was barely visible on clear days as a faint blue line just above the trees. His was the only uninhabited room that was kept up—it was far cleaner than the kitchen, for example, with its unwashed dishes, or the living room, littered with newspapers and whiskey glasses sticky with residue at the bottom. One wall of the bedroom was lined with shelf upon shelf of golden trophies, thirty-eight of them in all, polished and dusted and lined up neatly in order
of height. They were all gold, not silver or bronze, because my father had never taken second place in anything in his life. He competed in cross-country running, the 100-meter dash, the 200-meter dash, discus throwing, javelin hurling, the breaststroke, shot put, and football. He excelled at everything, but football was his love.
Eddie became the first-string quarterback for the Mannville Meteorites when he was only fifteen years old, and he threw against boys three and four years older than himself. He danced without effort from the clutches of behemoth farm boys from neighboring towns like Springville and Angola, boys strong enough to grab a cow by her horns and twist her head until she went mooing to her knees, and who wanted nothing more in their lives than to crush my father like a grape so he would stop throwing touchdown pass after touchdown pass. The Meteorites won four consecutive regional championships while my father was throwing for them, and went to the state finals three times, once returning victorious. On another wall were photographs: Eddie in a boat holding a prize-winning walleye, Eddie in a three-point stance wearing his helmet and jersey, Eddie throwing a javelin and looking like Achilles on the beach at Troy, various blurry Achaeans in the background shouting their approval. And finally, Eddie in his Air Force uniform, an American flag stretched out gloriously behind him, the white of the bars mimicking the brightness of his smile. This picture was taken about a year and a half before my birth. Hey, son, he seemed to be saying to me, war is great, flying is great, America is great, everything is great. Isn’t it fun to be a hero? Isn’t it great to be a Mann?
I stared at this particular photograph for hours, wishing mightily that I could jump into it and join my father in representing everything that was good about the world, and about America. Grandpa allowed me into my father’s room on the condition that I wouldn’t mess anything up. Certain things on the desk had been left untouched since my father placed them there. These were icons, religious relics that must never be disturbed, since Eddie was the last to use them. As a result, the desk was perhaps two or three centimeters thick with dust, a filthy oasis of sentimentality in a desert of spotlessness. The items themselves were nothing of note: a pen, some paper clips, a copy of A Farewell to Arms. Eddie had been a Hemingway fanatic. I was forbidden by my grandfather to read Hemingway, on the principle that it was he who’d inspired my father to go to war in the first place. I found this interdict enticing, but it would be several years before I picked up the book and read it for myself. For now, it was enough to look at the cover, the title barely visible under the dust, and know that the book hadn’t been moved since 1969, and that the last person to touch it had been my own dad, and that perhaps the only way for me to keep his ghost alive, to speak to him through the veil of death, was to venerate these things as my grandfather did, to treat them as though they were some sort of radio transmitters permanently tuned in to the frequency of the afterlife.
My father had been a daredevil, Grandpa told me proudly. He was convinced at an early age that he could fly; Grandpa still had the collection of plaster casts to prove it. They were kept in the basement, near the jars of herbs, permanent impressions of my father’s various limbs taken at different ages, removed and saved after the bones healed. There were five of them—three legs and two arms. I inherited my father’s madly suicidal tendencies, much to Grandpa’s delight, although my courage—some might call it stupidity—took the form of high-speed stunts performed on the riding lawnmower, which interested me more than jumping off the carriage-house roof—my father’s favorite routine. Grandpa had long since given up mowing the huge yard, and he’d removed the blade from the mower to make it safe for me to operate. It was a good thing he had. I was constantly practicing such tricks as standing on the hood while steering backward, or attempting a headstand on the seat while steering with my bare toes. Grandpa sat on the doghouse roof and roared his drunken approval. I fell off more times than I stayed on, especially in the higher gears, and several times the mower rolled over an arm or a leg, and once my whole body. Thanks to the foresight of Grandpa, however, I came through my childhood not only intact, but entirely unafraid of anything the physical world had to offer.
Sometimes in the afternoons we played Munchkins. This was great fun because it was bloody and murderous and frightening, and I never knew exactly what was going to happen. But it went mostly like this:
Grandpa sat on the roof of the old doghouse, unoccupied now by any dog, with a glass of whiskey nearby and his fedora pushed back on his head. I would stand next to him and he’d put his hand on my shoulder. We would be absolutely silent. My ears would ring with the vast depth of the quiet that had suddenly descended over the yard. I was attuned, coiled, ready. Suddenly there would come a rustle from the bushes.
“There they are,” I whisper, pointing.
“Right!” Grandpa shouts. He sets down his whiskey and begins pulling imaginary things out of the doghouse, handing them to me.
“Dynamite?” he says.
“Check.”
“Fuse?”
“Check.”
“Plunger?”
“Check.”
“You have all your equipment? Compass, pistol, flare gun, life jacket, inflatable raft, fishing rod?” Sometimes this game became confused in Grandpa’s mind with his sojourn in the South Pacific, and he liked to make sure I had everything I needed in case I somehow ended up in the ocean.
“Check.”
“Okay,” he says. “Go plant your charge.”
I would sneak off to whatever bush or tree or hedge the Munchkins were hiding in this time. The Munchkins were a band of horrible ferocious creatures who’d lived in our yard since the beginning of the world. They were small, about my height, and they had long fangs dripping with saliva and claws that could rip you in half. The men had beards reaching to their waists. The women ate human children whenever they could get them. It was imperative that they be wiped out so the world would be safe for kids again. Blowing up Munchkins was my terrifying duty, and I was proud to perform it. It was my responsibility as a hero, as the son of my father. I planted my charge in the bush, one hand on my pistol in case they should attack. Sometimes they did; the hand-to-hand combat that ensued was fierce, and I was often gravely wounded, but I always defeated them.
“How many are there?” Grandpa would shout from the doghouse.
“Eight hundred and eleven!”
“Jesus Christ! Report back to headquarters!”
I would race back to the doghouse.
“Ready on charge!”
“Right! Countdown!”
“Ten nine eight seven six five four three two one!”
“Kablammo!” shouted Grandpa, pressing down the plunger. The world would be shaken by a tremendous explosion. I’d be knocked to my feet, lie unconscious for a few moments, then return to where I’d set the charge to finish off any survivors or to take prisoners, depending on my mood toward them that day.
This was long before I’d ever watched a television; my stealthy reconnaissance of the Simpson home and their mysterious flashing box didn’t count, since I hadn’t come close enough yet to figure out what it was. The Munchkins were the first things in my life of which I was seriously afraid. I was twenty years old when I finally saw The Wizard of Oz and the creatures of my childhood nightmares were revealed to me for what they really were: a sham, a put-on, a master hustle pulled on me by unwitting Hollywood con men. Munchkins were not ferocious or terrible at all, although they were slightly unnerving. I was outraged. It would be many more years before Willie Mann’s diary was restored to me, its rightful owner, and I would read the following entry, which, like so many of Willie’s other entries, seemed addressed specifically to me:
There comes a time in every man’s life when his worst fears are shown by the cold light of reason to be mere shadows cast by insignificant objects. When this time comes, one may either grow angry over it, or shrug one’s shoulders and keep on. This is the true test of adulthood, for he who is resentful of the events which have shap
ed him has not yet assumed control of his own destiny.
But in those days I knew nothing of adulthood or destiny or even of reason. I only knew that the Munchkins frightened me but that I loved to play the game over and over because it was a game Grandpa told me he’d played with my father, just the way he did with me; a man and a boy, utterly alone in the world, defying nature by pretending that what was real was not and what was not real was.
Between the nightmares of the strange foreign soldiers chasing me through the woods and the Munchkins who haunted the vast yard, I began to lose sleep. My entire world, which had previously been limited to the woods and the Lake and occasional spying trips to the Simpson home, had been invaded by powerful evil. It lurked everywhere, growing darker and more terrible by the day, until it became a feeling that came over me, a feeling with a personality of its own. It even had a name: the Dreaded Scarum.
I don’t remember how or why I invented the name of the Scarum. Most likely I’d heard Grandpa say it once: “That’ll scare ’em,” he might have told me, of the Munchkins, or perhaps the Pittsburgh Steelers, whom Grandpa despised. The Scarum became fixed in my mind as the being who controlled all bad things. Not only did he cause them, he liked to cause them. It was his raison d’être. The Scarum was always on the lookout for a chance to scare me. I drew pictures of him: he was a great winged dog with the head of a lion, and at night he floated in the sky over the old farmhouse. Sometimes I could hear him breathing.
It was the Scarum who’d killed my father, not the Viet Cong. It was he also who’d caused Grandpa to be shot down by Enzo Fujimora; who’d made Grandpa lose all our money in the Fiasco of the Ostriches; who made Mr. Simpson shout at his children. They were his long and slippery hands that reached out from under my bed at night, scrabbling frantically at the covers to grab my feet and pull me under with him. I lay shivering every night in a tight ball under my blankets, too scared to sleep and too ashamed to call to Grandpa. The occasional bumps and squeaks and groans of the ghosts in our house hardly disturbed me at all anymore. They were, after all, my relatives, and I knew they wouldn’t hurt me; it was Grandpa with whom they were upset. The Scarum was far worse than any ghost, and to make it worse, the ghosts themselves were powerless over him. They could only ring me in a protective circle, which they did each night in the form of tiny dancing lights; occasionally I could feel a warm hand on my cheek, when one or another of them would materialize long enough to give me a comforting pat. I would start out of half-sleep when I felt this, unsure if it had really been a ghost or if Grandpa had sneaked in just long enough to check on me. It didn’t matter. I was watched over by my family, and it was they who carried me safely through the darkness of each night.
Eddie's Bastard Page 6
