Where things got a little edgier was where the photographs started. There was one—it took up a full page and was a source of amazement and total terror—and my sister knew it. The giant grouper, which changes sex from female to male—and that poignant line “has been known to eat small boys whole.” She could always get me with the giant grouper, and my own fixation on trying to confront the fear only made it more powerful. Time and again I’d sneak peeks at that fat, suckered face, hoping to be able to stare down that brute—but I couldn’t. The page was too big and I felt swallowed whole every time.
My sister got me hooked on the World Book Encyclopedia and presided over our collection of story records, which she taught me to play on my own. So I came to be friends with Ebenezer Scrooge, Huckleberry Finn, Lancelot and Guinevere, the Prince and the Pauper, and the Swiss Family Robinson. The story record we both enjoyed the most, however, was a Walt Disney creation that brought together the two great Washington Irving tales Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, which you’d have to say have never gone out of fashion. The character voices were superb and the music was a major improvement on what appeared in the cartoon movies. What really got us, though, was “The Headless Horseman Song,” in which Brom Bones famously terrorizes Ichabod Crane, knowing he can scare the bejesus out of him to keep him from winning the attention of Katrina Van Tassel. Along about midnight, the ghosts and Van Cheese get together for their nightly jamborees . . .
I’d have to say this was a defining story in our lives. For once you cross the bridge, the ghost is through, his power ends. You can never be sure if Ichabod is pursued by the mutilated rider who haunts the old Dutch countryside of the Hudson River Valley, and everyone who’s been there knows just what an odd locale it is (and anyone who knows Dutch people knows how odd they are)—or if the whole awful ordeal is a well-played but pretty mean prank by Brom Bones. The desire to believe in the Headless Horseman—the supernatural evil—works hard against the mundane explanation. (A tension I’d have quite a bit to do with, as it turns out.)
When the eerie laughter and the music began, I’d get on my rocking horse and start frantically riding for the bridge. It was a trance state that took over my whole body, producing an intense erection and electrifying the hairs on the back of my neck—a delirious high like unto a drug, if I’d known then what drugs were like.
With a hip-hip and a clippity-clop
He’s out looking for a head to swap
So don’t try to figure out a plan
You can’t reason with a headless man.
But as scary as Brom Bones and the Headless Horseman were, my sister and I both lived in dire, glorious fear of Van Cheese—picturing him as the awakened corpse of some ghastly, slobbering, burlap-headed Dutch renegade soldier from the Hessian or War of 1812 times . . . a vast, rotting presence, lord of spirits and convener of dark ceremonies. It would be many, many years and strange, dark ceremonies of our own before we’d realize that the words we both heard and came to sing along to in our exuberant terror—the name and the dreadful ghoulish presence it inspired—was all a misunderstanding.
Along about midnight it wasn’t the ghosts and Van Cheese who came out for their fiendish fun—it was the ghosts and banshees. A much different proposition. I think both of us are glad we didn’t know that then. We would’ve missed a delicious fright that we could actually savor.
The curious thing is that we both knew what banshees were—even me. We were rather well versed in magical beings in our house. But it says something about the nature of perceptions, families and how mythologies grow, that for years the specter of Van Cheese loomed in our living room. I’ve often wondered since if what would happen later was foreshadowed in this imagined predator. Or does a shared mistake reveal a family tendency to personify darkness—and so to call it forth? Maybe what we fantasized Van Cheese to represent is always there, in every living room, waiting to take shape and give new shadow to midnight, whenever summoned by either vulnerability or desire. And perhaps those two states of being are but different names for the same thing if we delved deeper. I think back to my rocking . . . the as-yet undefined blur between ozone excitement, fear, erotic stimulation, hunger, longing, innocence, greed—both pursuit and escape. In any case, we lived for what seemed like then eternity and now but a moment, in a conspiracy of improvisation and invention, when we weren’t lost in The Wonderful World of Disney, Honey West and Hawaiian Eye.
CUCKOO
Some things just can’t be talked about. So they end up taking on a peculiar life of their own. Alicia Sandringham, for example.
She was an energetic, eccentric woman who supported our church and was one of the family’s “benefactors.” (We needed several of these because of the way my parents managed their money.) She’d inherited a considerable fortune from her father, who was a big hardware merchant back in Illinois, and she was intent on doing good with some of those substantial proceeds.
As a dedicated Christian woman, this would lead her to Africa, where she founded a literacy center in what was then Rhodesia. She helped out in the villages. She washed babies. She built a medical clinic... and twice a year, she came back to the house she maintained in the Berkeley Hills, which she let my father and mother use for church functions, provided a stout, nervous man named Mr. Sewickley was informed.
Alicia Sandringham was over six feet tall, was in her late fifties, and had never been married. She had thick, short hair that reminded me of an eraser on the end of a pencil. She was a powerful but not necessarily tuneful singer, yet she was a bastion of my mother’s choir and I think may have contributed to my mother’s tuition when Mom went back to the university for a graduate degree.
All these things I came to understand over time, but what I could see for myself were the pictures that remained in the house . . . many photographs over many years, of her and an African woman whose name I couldn’t pronounce. They’d met in Berkeley, where the woman was studying. The idea of going to Africa came out of the relationship with this woman, what my mother called Alicia’s “lifelong friend.” Even in Berkeley it was necessary then to disguise certain things—or to seek greater freedoms far away. I see it pretty clearly now. There’s no mistaking particular postures and expressions between two people—especially not when there are many photographs to examine. Two strong women, both never married, the difference in race and culture only seeming to make their connection more complementary. One tall, thin and white . . . the other round, buxom and black. Subdued, mute masculine clothes . . . bright-colored female robes.
But of course, they were both fervent Christians, doing God’s work in a developing country, so nothing was ever said. And I don’t think that this had anything to do with us kids being too young to understand—because I, at least, did understand, in some unspoken, child-savant way. I could read the photographs. Although my family, like many, was obsessed with photographing our lives, few of those pictures were ever really looked at, to see what story they told. Once captured, the moments actually faded. Anything not intentional, not posed, became invisible. Life lived this way has a curious tendency to become even more dreamlike than it is. An alternative world takes shape around all the things unacknowledged.
Looking back now, I think how much better it would’ve been if my family could’ve openly accepted the nature of Alicia’s life, Christianity and all, and not ignored it through a superficial politeness or supposed respect for privacy. Children aren’t that easy to fool. I may not have understood the details, but I had a keen sense of the underlying reality. I believe this is innate in most children generally. The question then becomes to what extent the instinct is nurtured or suppressed. Oddly, it may be nurtured because it’s suppressed. It becomes a method of psychic self-defense. I’m fairly sure this is what happened in my case.
I came to see Alicia’s home as a haunted house. If she was robust and always beaming, with tales of life in Africa upon her annual returns, there was about the empty place when she was gone a dee
per emptiness than met my parents’ eyes. White linen laid over furniture, a stale fragrance of dust and silence, punctuated only by the click-click-clicking of the ornate cuckoo clock in the living room, which Mr. Sewickley, Alicia’s neighbor and caretaker, kept continuously ticking, even when she was away.
He was a man you could never imagine having been young. Plump, always overdressed—with soft, oily hands that he powdered with talc. “Fastidious” my mother called him. He lived alone in a big house two doors away, and as far as I knew, his chief occupation in life was making sure the cuckoo clock kept working, tinging out the hours in a house of ghostly sheets and photographs of black children far away.
The clock mesmerized me. It was unusually large—heavily carved and laden with all manner of frippery and trim. The numerals were impossibly intricate to read. Even the hands seemed overstated—and I was at the age when telling time was still an achievement, and I called the hands “arrows,” which is more accurate.
Whenever we were over and Alicia was gone (which is a strange thing in itself), I took to climbing on top of a hassock and peering into the secret world inside the clock. What was going on inside between the hours? I imagined a complex inner life—a life every bit as mysterious as my own family’s—and with reason.
Because on the hour, one of two figures would emerge through the little snap-shutting double doors with the gold filigree. On the even hours, a tiny woodsman would slide out on his chain-driven track and swing his axe to seemingly split a log, which would ring as if he’d struck a metal wedge. The number of blows denoted the number of the hours, and I was amazed for a long time that he knew exactly how many times to swing his axe.
I was even more mystified at first by his wife, who came out on the odd hours and rang a little circle of metal with a rod, as if calling the woodsman home to eat. This was the explanation my mother offered, but it didn’t ring true to me. Why should she have to clink harder at 11 am than at 1 pm, which was more like lunchtime? More importantly, why did she need to call him at all, when I knew he was inside the house of the clock?
“Maybe he’s lazy, and she’s calling him out to chop more wood,” my mother said.
Once I remember asking her, “Do we live inside a kind of clock too?”
I don’t recall being satisfied with the answer I received.
It’s funny how people resist precision and then worry about regularity and stability. (For a long time I associated the term regularity , which I often heard mentioned on TV, with the behavior of the woodsman and his wife in the cuckoo clock.) That was another thing. Why was it called a cuckoo clock? There was no little bird that popped out to screech or tweet. I felt the woodsman and his wife were living under false pretenses. The truth of their lives went unregarded despite their best efforts on the hour to demonstrate their existence. What more could they do? They were as faithful in the performance of their duties as anyone or anything could be, and often I would think of them, shuttling forth from their cozy house when no one was around to see or hear them—because Mr. Sewickley had shuttled forth from his house from time to time to insure they were still clicking and clinking.
I felt rather sorry for them, always working, always trying to prove they weren’t cuckoos. I hoped their life inside the clock was more interesting, and I imagined all sorts of things that they’d get up to. What would a man and woman do all day inside a house that was a clock? I wondered why they didn’t have any children, not knowing at the time anything about how children came to be—other than the fact that so many men and women seemed to have them. The woodsmen and his wife just appeared, like clockwork.
Becoming ever more puzzled by these questions, one afternoon prior to a Bible study class my mother had organized, once Mr. Sewickley had removed the white sheets from the furniture and dabbed himself with his handkerchief (which was like a little bedsheet he carried in his pocket), I took off my shoes and climbed atop the hassock that I pushed into position, to make a closer inspection of the world of the timepiece’s interior.
Of course it was always hard to see much through the itsy bitsy windows, and despite my fantasies, the evidence suggested the two figures didn’t move much if at all inside—although I naturally found this very hard to believe. I felt somewhat guilty peeking, because I realized I very much wanted to know what was going on inside the houses around ours, but I knew without having to ask that peering in through the windows wouldn’t be welcomed, regardless of the excellent reasons for wanting to do so. If it didn’t seem right to peep into a house, it couldn’t be right to peep into a house that looked like a clock. But I did anyway.
On this occasion, however, I somehow got too involved in my investigation and was caught by surprise when the hour struck. Out swept the woodsman’s wife and startled me, so that in trying to avoid falling from the hassock, I grabbed the clock and the wife broke off into my hands.
Needless to say, I was worried. I knew instantly that Mr. Sewickley would be shaken from his track by the news. Some kind of punishment was inevitable. Perhaps I’d never be allowed to return. I’d almost assuredly be told to stay away from the clock from then on.
But in the moment, what was more on my mind was the woodsman’s wife. When I looked down at the little carved wooden figure I held in my hand, I realized she wasn’t a woman. She was simply the woodsman wearing a dress. It was the same figure, only in a different costume. I’d had some vague suspicions along these lines before, but I’d never been able to verify them. Up close and static now, it was obvious.
This reminded me that my sister had insisted once over Salisbury steak that Mr. Blaycock wore a dress (he lived three houses away from us with his cousin Ernest). She knew because she’d seen him in the window when she was selling mints for the Lions Club. Nothing more was said about this by our parents or grandmother, but my sister remained convinced.
Partly to try to take the focus off my damage to the clock, but more because I was genuinely flummoxed, I pointed out the likeness to my mother. She was upset with me and was bustling around getting teacakes and apple cider ready for the Bible study. She was in no mood to scrutinize the figure. Did this mean the woodsman really lived alone and sometimes came out wearing a dress?
“Don’t be silly,” my mother said. “You’ve caused trouble enough. It’s the woodsman’s wife. She’s wearing a dress. The woodsman’s still inside.”
“But it looks just like the woodsman,” I said. “It’s the woodsman wearing a dress.”
“It’s just not a very good carving,” she replied.
Five minutes later, she lied to Mr. Sewickley when he stuck his head back in. “Something happened to the clock,” she said. “Hopefully, it’s not permanent.”
“This broke off,” I said, a bit more truthfully, handing him the figurine.
He looked so mortified I thought he might’ve been broken too. I slipped away quickly into another part of the house, to look at the photographs of Alicia in Africa, smiling in front of a thatched hut and a portable concrete mixer beside her best friend.
THE EAR
Every perfect family needs a Shetland pony, right? Girls and horses.
I missed my sister’s doll era (I don’t think she had much of one), but she was deeply committed to miniature horses. I’d say there were over a hundred by the time I could tie my shoelaces by myself. She kept them dusted with a moist washcloth every day. From there it seemed a natural evolution to getting her a real horse of some sort to ride. (I sorely wished this same principle had applied to my interest in robots.)
Our mother, who felt that horseback riding was the ideal way to emphasize what she considered her aristocratic bearing and patrician heritage, aided her in this scheme. (In truth, her father had just been a country doctor with a thick head of white hair and a modest talent on the viola, who’d inherited a big, drafty house full of chimney swifts and field mice—but in her mind it was a mansion on the hill, and she couldn’t believe she’d given up a roomful of suitors bringing her corsages and had
chosen my minister father, who tied fishing flies at the dinner table and did ridiculous imitations of Hitler with a black comb held above his upper lip, even if he hadn’t been into the infamous cupboard where he kept his hooch.)
The family’s fixation on horses (along with all their associated costs) would have some profound repercussions on our finances and solidarity when the divorce eventually happened (which was something like the earthquakes we experienced so often, only it didn’t stop—it just kept shaking things apart). But the obsession started out modestly enough, with a Shetland pony ride at Tilden Park for my sister. I was quite happy to stick with the merry-go-round. (I particularly enjoyed riding the giant rooster, so perhaps I shouldn’t make any comments about girls and horses.)
Of course worshipping miniature horses is one thing; actually getting on a slightly less miniature horse is another. My sister was petrified, which I found deeply amusing. Somehow, it seemed like such a long way to the ground to her—and yet she so wanted to be able to do it. Dad’s solution was ever a lateral one (although many would’ve said “skewed”).
One of his techniques for getting us over any fear of the water had been to blindfold us. As strange as that may sound, it had worked very well, and both my sister and I became good, fearless swimmers at a fairly young age. It was true that I was forced to wear a life preserver in open water like a lake, but even Dad occasionally employed some sensible precautions.
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