by Paul Auster
The most celebrated figure from your part of the world was Thomas Edison, who had been dead for just sixteen years when you were born. Edison’s laboratory was in West Orange, not far from your house in adjacent South Orange, and because it had been turned into a museum after the inventor’s death, a national landmark, you visited it several times on school trips when you were a child, reverently paying homage to the Wizard of Menlo Park, who was responsible for more than a thousand inventions, including the incandescent lightbulb, the phonograph, and the movies, which to your mind made Edison one of the most important men who had ever lived, the number one scientist in human history. After a tour of the lab, visitors would be taken outside to a building called the Black Maria, a large tar-paper shack that had been the first film studio in the world, and there you and your classmates would watch a projection of The Great Train Robbery, the first feature film ever made. You felt that you had entered the innermost sanctum of genius, a holy shrine. Yes, Sherlock Holmes was your favorite thinker back then, a fearless exemplar of intellectual probity, the one who unveiled to you the miracle and the power of systematic, rational deduction, but Holmes was no more than a figment, an imaginary being who existed only in words, whereas Edison had been real, a flesh-and-blood man, and because his inventions had been created so close to where you lived, almost within shouting distance of your house, you felt a special connection to Edison, a singular intensity of admiration, if not whole-hog, out-and-out worship. You read at least two biographies of your hero before you were ten (a Landmark book first, then one of those orange books with the silhouette illustrations), saw television broadcasts of the two films that had been made about him—Young Tom Edison (with Mickey Rooney), Edison the Man (with Spencer Tracy)—and for some reason (it strikes you as preposterous now), you imagined there was something significant about the fact that both your birthday and Edison’s birthday fell in early February and, even more significant, that you had been born exactly one hundred years after Edison (minus a week). But best of all, most important of all, the thing that solidified your bond with Edison to the point of profoundest kinship, was the discovery that the man who cut your hair had once been Edison’s personal barber. His name was Rocco, a short, not-so-young man who wielded his comb and scissors in a shop just beyond the edge of the Seton Hall College campus, which was only a few blocks from your house. This was the mid-fifties, the late fifties, the era of the flattop and the crew cut, of white bucks and white socks and saddle shoes, of Keds sneakers and stiff, stiff jeans, and since you wore your hair short in the same way nearly every other boy did at the time, visits to the barbershop were frequent, on average twice a month, which meant that every other week throughout your childhood you sat in Rocco’s chair looking at a large reproduction of a portrait of Edison that hung on the wall just to the left of the mirror, a picture with a handwritten note stuck into the lower right-hand corner of the frame that read: To my friend Rocco: Genius is 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration—Thomas A. Edison. Rocco was the link that tied you directly to Edison, for the hands that had once touched the inventor’s head were now touching your head, and who was to say that the thoughts inside Edison’s head had not traveled into Rocco’s fingers, and because those fingers were now touching you, was it not reasonable to assume that some of those thoughts might now be sinking into your head? You didn’t believe any of this, of course, but you liked to pretend you did, and each time you sat in Rocco’s chair, you enjoyed playing this game of magical thought transference, as if you, who were destined to invent nothing, who would demonstrate not the smallest aptitude for things mechanical in years to come, were the legitimate heir of Edison’s mind. Then, to your astonishment, your father quietly informed you one day that he had worked in Edison’s lab after graduating from high school. Nineteen twenty-nine, his first full-time job, one of the many young men who had toiled under the master at Menlo Park. Nothing more than that. Perhaps he was trying to spare your feelings by not telling you the rest of the story, but the mere fact that Edison had been a part of your family’s history, which meant that he was now a part of your history as well, quickly trumped Rocco’s fingers as the most important link to the great man. You were immensely proud of your father. Surely this was the most vital piece of information he had ever shared about himself, and you never tired of passing that information on to your friends. My father worked for Edison. Meaning, you would now suppose, that your remote and uncommunicative father was no longer a complete cipher to you, that he was really someone, after all, a person who had made a contribution to the fundamental business of bettering the world. It wasn’t until you were fourteen that your father told you the second half of the story. The job with Edison had lasted only a few days, you now learned—not because your father hadn’t been doing well, but because Edison had found out he was Jewish, and since no Jews were allowed in the sacred precincts of Menlo Park, the old man summoned your father to his office and fired him on the spot. Your idol turned out to have been a rabid, hate-filled anti-Semite, a well-known fact that had not been included in any of the books you read about him.
Nevertheless, living heroes held far more sway over you than dead ones, even such exalted figures as Edison, Lincoln, and the young shepherd David, who slew the mighty Goliath with a single stone. Like all small boys, you wanted your father to be a hero, but your notion of heroism was too narrowly defined back then to grant your father a place in the pantheon. In your mind, heroism had to do with courage in battle, it was a question of how a person conducted himself in the midst of war, and your father was excluded from consideration because he hadn’t fought in the war, the war being the Second World War, which had ended just eighteen months before you were born. The fathers of most of your friends had been soldiers, they had served the cause in one way or another, and when the little gang you belonged to gathered to stage mock battles in your suburban backyards, pretending to be fighting in Europe (against the Nazis) or on some island in the Pacific (against the Japanese), your friends often showed up with various pieces of military equipment that had been given to them by their fathers (helmets, canteens, metal cups, cartridge belts, binoculars) in order to make the games feel more authentic. You, however, always came empty-handed. Later on, you learned that your father had been exempted from military service because he was in the wire business, which the government had deemed essential to the war effort. That always felt a bit lame to you, but the truth was that your father was older than the other fathers, already thirty when America entered the war, which meant he might not have been drafted in any case. You were just five and six and seven when you played soldier with your friends, much too young to understand anything about your father’s wartime situation, and so you began to question him about why he had no equipment to lend you for your games, perhaps even to pester him, and because your father could not bring himself to tell you that he hadn’t served in the army (was he ashamed—or was it simply that he felt you would be disappointed?), he concocted a ruse to satisfy your wishes—and also, perhaps, to elevate himself in your eyes, to be seen as a hero—but the trick backfired on him and wound up disappointing you, just as your father had feared the truth would disappoint you. One night, he stole into your room after you had been put to bed. He thought you were asleep, but you weren’t, your eyes were still open, and without saying a word you watched your father put two or three objects on your desk and then tiptoe out of the room. In the morning, you discovered that the objects were worn-out specimens of military gear—only one of which you can still see with any certainty: a tin canteen encased in thick green canvas. At breakfast, your father told you that he had dug up some of his old stuff from the war, but you weren’t fooled, you knew in your heart that those things had never belonged to him, that he had bought them the previous afternoon in an army surplus store, and although you said nothing, pretending to be happy with your gifts, you hated your father for lying to you like that. Now, all these years later, you feel only pity.
By contrast, there w
as the counselor at the day camp you attended during the summer when you were five, a young man named Lenny, no more than twenty-three or twenty-four years old, much liked by all the boys in his charge, slight of build, funny, warm, strongly opposed to harsh discipline, who had recently come home to New Jersey after serving as a soldier in Korea. You knew that a war was being fought over there, but the details were entirely obscure to you, and as far as you can remember, Lenny never talked about his experiences in combat. It was your mother who told you about them, she only twenty-seven at the time and therefore a contemporary of Lenny’s, and one afternoon when she came to fetch you, the two of them had a talk while you were gathering up your things, and when you and your mother were driving home in the car together, you could see how upset she was, more shaken than at any time you could remember (which surely accounts for why the incident has stayed with you all these years). She began telling you about frostbite, the intolerable cold of the Korean winters and the inadequate boots worn by the American soldiers, the badly designed boots that could do nothing to protect the feet of the infantrymen, causing frostbite, which blackened the toes and often led to amputation. Lenny, she said, poor Lenny had gone through all that, and now that your mother was explaining this to you, you realized that Lenny’s hands had also suffered from the cold, for you had noticed there was something wrong with the top joints of his fingers, that they were harder and more wrinkled than normal adult fingers, and what you had assumed to be a genetic defect of some kind you now understood was the result of war. Much as you had always liked him, Lenny now rose in your estimation to the rank of exalted person.
If your father wasn’t a hero to you, couldn’t be a hero to you, that didn’t mean you gave up searching for heroes elsewhere. Buster Crabbe and other movie cowboys served as early models, establishing a code of masculine honor to be studied and emulated, the man of few words who never looked for trouble but who would respond with daring and cunning whenever trouble found him, the man who upheld justice with quiet, self-effacing dignity and was willing to risk his life in the struggle between good and evil. Women could be heroic, too, at times even more courageous than men, but women were never your models for the simple reason that you were a boy, not a girl, and it was your destiny to grow up to become a man. By the time you were seven, the cowboys had given way to athletes, primarily baseball and football players, and while it puzzles you now that you should have thought that excelling at ball games could have taught you anything about how to live your life, there it was, for by now you had become a passionate young sportsman yourself, a boy who had turned these pastimes into the very center of his existence, and when you saw how the great ones performed under the pressure of do-or-die moments in stadiums thronged with fifty or sixty thousand people, you felt they were the incontestable heroes of your world. From courage under fire to skill under fire, the ability to thread a bullet pass through heavy coverage into the hands of a receiver or to lash a double to right-center field when the hit-and-run is on, physical prowess now instead of moral grandeur, or perhaps physical virtues translated into moral grandeur, but again, there it was, and you nurtured these admirations of yours all through the middle years of your childhood. Before you turned eight, you had already written your first fan letter, inviting Cleveland Browns quarterback Otto Graham, the top professional football player of the day, to attend your upcoming birthday party in New Jersey. To your everlasting surprise, Graham wrote back to you, sending a short, typewritten letter on official Cleveland Browns stationery. Needless to say, he declined the invitation, telling you that he had other obligations that morning, but the graciousness of his response mitigated the sting of disappointment—for even though you’d known it was a long shot, a part of you had thought he might actually come, and you had played out the scene of his arrival a hundred times in your head. Then, some months after that, you wrote to Bobby S., the captain and quarterback of the local high school football team, telling him what a magnificent player you thought he was, and because you were such a runt back then, which meant that your letter must have bordered on the ridiculous, filled with spelling errors and inane malapropisms, Bobby S. took the trouble to write back to you, no doubt touched to learn that he had such a young fan, and now that the football season had come to an end, he invited you to a basketball game as his guest (he played football in the autumn, basketball in the winter, and baseball in the spring—a three-sport superstar), instructing you to come down to the floor during warm-ups to identify yourself, which you did, and then Bobby S. found a spot for you on the bench, where you watched the game with the team. Bobby S. was all of seventeen or eighteen at the time, no more than an adolescent, but to you he was a full-grown man, a giant, as were all the other players on the squad. You watched the game in a blur of happiness, sitting in that old high school gym that had been built in the 1920s, both jangled and inspirited by the noise of the crowd around you, awed by the beauty of the cheerleaders who came prancing onto the floor during time-outs, rooting for your man Bobby S., who had made all this possible for you, but of the game itself you remember nothing, not a single shot, rebound, or stolen pass—only the fact that you were there, overjoyed to be sitting on the bench with the high school team, feeling as if you had stepped into the pages of a Chip Hilton novel.
A friend of your parents’, Roy B., had played third base for the Newark Bears, the legendary minor league team that had once been part of the New York Yankees system. Nicknamed Whoops—for shouting out that word whenever he made an error in the field—he never made it to the major leagues, but he had played with and against any number of future all-stars, and since everyone liked the fast-talking, effervescent Whoops, a squat fireplug of a man who owned a men’s discount clothing store out on Route 22, he was still in touch with many of his old ballplayer friends. He and his wife, Dolly, had three children, all girls, none of whom had any interest in baseball, and because he knew how much you cared about the game, both as a player and as a fan, he took you under his wing as a kind of surrogate son or nephew, a boy in any case, to share his baseball past with. One weekday night in the spring of 1956, just as you were about to go to bed, the telephone rang and, lo and behold, there was Phil Rizzuto on the other end of the line, the one and only Scooter, the Yankees’ shortstop from 1941 until his retirement earlier that month, asking if you were Paul, Whoops’s young friend. I’ve heard you’re a terrific infielder, he said, speaking in that famously jovial voice of his, and I just wanted to say hello and tell you to keep up the good work. You had been caught off guard, you barely knew what to say, you were too flummoxed and tongue-tied to give more than one-syllable answers to Rizzuto’s questions, but this was your first conversation with a legitimate hero, and even though it lasted no more than a couple of minutes, you nevertheless felt honored by that unexpected call, ennobled by your brush with the great man. Then, a week or two later, a postcard arrived in the mail. On the front, a color photograph of the interior of Whoops’s clothing store: rack after rack of men’s suits under the glare of fluorescent lights, ghost-like suits with no bodies in them, an army of the missing. On the back, a handwritten message: “Dear Paul, Hurry and grow up. The Cards can use a good third baseman. Yours, Stan Musial.” Phil Rizzuto had been one thing, an excellent player whose career was now behind him, but Musial was one of the immortals, a .330 lifetime hitter who ranked as the National League equivalent of Ted Williams, a player still in his prime, Stan the Man, the left-handed slugger with the curved stance and lightning-quick bat, and you imagined him strolling into Whoops’s store one afternoon to say hello to his old friend and the ever-vigilant Whoops asking Musial to write a few words to his little protégé, a short message for the kid, and now those words were sitting in your hands, which made you feel as if a god had reached out and touched you on the forehead. There was more, however, at least one more act of kindness from the good-hearted Whoops, a final display of generosity that surpassed all the other gifts he had bestowed on you. How would you like to meet Whitey
Ford? he asked you one day. It was still 1956, but mid-October by then, not long after the end of the World Series. Of course you would like to meet Whitey Ford, you answered, you would love to meet Whitey Ford, who was the ace pitcher of the champion Yankees, the pitcher with the highest winning percentage in the history of the game, the short, brilliant lefty who had just completed his finest season. What person in his right mind would not want to meet Whitey Ford? And so it was arranged: Whoops and Whitey would stop by your house one afternoon next week, sometime between three-thirty and four, late enough to be certain you would be back from school. You had no idea what to expect, but you hoped the visit would be a long one, with Whoops and Whitey sitting around the living room with you for several hours talking baseball, during which Whitey would divulge the subtlest, most hidden secrets about the art of pitching, for in looking at you he would see straight into your soul and understand that, young as you might have been, you were someone worthy of being entrusted with that forbidden knowledge. On the appointed day, you rushed home from school, which was just a short distance from your house, and waited, waited for what must have been an hour and a half but felt as if it were a week, fretfully pacing around the rooms on the ground floor, all alone with your thoughts, your mother and father both off at work, your five-year-old sister God knows where, alone in the little clapboard house on Irving Avenue, growing more and more nervous about the supreme encounter, wondering if Whoops and Whitey would actually show up, fearing they had forgotten the rendezvous, or had been delayed by unforeseen circumstances, or had been killed in a car crash, and then, finally, when you were beginning to despair that Whitey Ford would ever set foot in your house, the doorbell rang. You opened the door, and there on the front steps was the five-foot-six-inch Whoops and the five-foot-ten-inch Yankee pitcher. A big smile from Whoops, followed by a terse but friendly handshake from the maestro. You invited them in, but Whoops or Whitey (impossible to remember which one) said they were running late and had only dropped by for a quick hello. You did your best to hide your disappointment, understanding that Whitey Ford would not in fact be setting foot in your house and that no secret knowledge would be imparted to you that day. The three of you stood there talking for what amounted to four minutes at most, which should have been enough to satisfy you, and surely would have been enough if you had not begun to suspect that the Whitey Ford standing on the front steps of your house was not the real Whitey Ford. He was the right size, his voice had the proper Queens accent, but something about his face looked different from the pictures you had seen of him, less handsome somehow, the round cheeks less round than they should have been, and even though his hair was blond, as Whitey’s hair was, it was cut in a severe flattop, whereas in all the photos you had seen of Whitey his hair was longer, combed back in a kind of modified pompadour. You wondered if the real Whitey Ford had backed out of the visit and that Whoops, not wanting to let you down, had produced this more or less reasonable facsimile of Whitey as a substitute. To quiet your doubts, you began asking Whitey or not-Whitey questions about his record of the past season. Nineteen and six, he said, which was the correct answer. Two point four seven, which was also the correct answer, but still you couldn’t shake the thought that a not–Whitey Ford might have done some homework before the visit so as not to be tripped up by a wiseass nine-year-old kid, and when he thrust out his right arm to shake your hand good-bye, you weren’t sure if you were shaking Whitey Ford’s hand or the hand of someone else. You still don’t know. For the first time in your life, an experience had led you into a zone of absolute ambiguity. A question had been raised, and it could not be answered.
