I told my father that Lears kept a journal. One day he had mentioned, apropos of not too much, that he often found it helpful when he was bothered by some issue, philosophic or personal, to sit down and lay his thoughts out in written form. Huh? The idea that someone would do this, like the idea that someone would eschew TV, would drink only tea, and would wear old clothes when he could afford new—these notions had me scratching my head, if only in passing. People I knew simply did not do these things. Who, for instance, would ever be faced with an issue so complex that it needed writing down? Then who could find the words to give it expression? I could maybe write a paragraph or two in English class under the rolling eye of Miss Cullen, but that would be about something we’d read, or should have. (I was rather good at guessing what the plot of a book might be from reading the first dozen pages or so, though sometimes this method failed, with me killing off many of the major figures in the end simply because they had rubbed me the wrong way on first encounter.) But using writing to make things clearer? I could not do it. I lived in a near phantasmagoria of feelings and illusions and hopes, with occasionally a stab of reasonable sunlight sliding in. If you had asked me to describe my family, my religious views, my politics, my likes and dislikes in music, I would have left the page empty or made something up. I was probably afraid of cogency, scared of what I’d see—didn’t want any of that business at all.
To the information about the journal and the exploratory writing, my father just gave a grunt. He wrote only Raytheon reports, no essays in the manner of Emerson and Thoreau, but he did take himself to be a prose stylist of distinction. He periodically delivered a lecture that might have been titled “When You Write Something, You Must Never Make a Mistake.” The lecture was an outgrowth of his central commandment about life, which, in digest form, was Never Make a Mistake, Period—Be Like Me. He talked with Ciceronian expansiveness about the rigors of punctuation, about the necessity for impeccable spelling. “Look it up if you don’t know it! If you don’t know it, look it up!” He was a similarly inspired professor of math or science. He would help me for a few minutes, then begin hollering his math-science slogan: “Either you know it or you don’t! Either you know it or you don’t!” When it came time to write my college applications, my father took control and composed them himself. When he was finished with one of the essays, he read it aloud to my mother and brother and me, then declared it worthy of Abraham Lincoln—which was true enough: It sounded a good deal like the Gettysburg Address.
What I was perhaps telling my father—unbeknownst to me, for at this point I would have told you that Frank Lears was a walking joke—was that I had found someone else to listen to, someone who seemed to be dealing cards from another deck. I wanted my father to see that though in the past I had rarely even made small shows of resisting his influence, I might now be open to someone else’s, that a diminutive scholar was piquing my interest and that, strangely, slowly, I was waking up from what seemed years of sleep, sleep that only fatigued and dulled me further. These feelings flowed like a tentative underground stream. I knew virtually nothing of them; my father, perhaps less. He had not done his job well enough and was not doing it, but, I probably wished to say, come and take over the seemingly pointless and dull kid sitting absorbed by his woes and dreams; there’s still time and, truth be told, there are few other contenders for the prize. What Frank Lears offered scared me, and I would rather have stayed home.
My father would eventually meet Lears in a dutiful sort of way, just as he went off dutifully to watch most of my football games—or, often, to watch me watching them from the bench. He watched us lose to Malden, his own high school, on Thanksgiving Day, watched me deck the opposing star fullback, sending him flying off the ground, a play that, I was told, found its way into highlight films for years after.
But generally my father had his own troubles and little attention left for me, who, at least on the surface, would have represented simply one trouble more. His own father had remarried after my grandmother died. (He told me once that though she died when he was one and a half years old, he was sure he could remember his mother’s face—but he said this, ostensibly, not to underline the strength of his feelings but to celebrate a feat of memory.) My father was the last of my grandfather’s children, the youngest, with three sisters and a brother. He was named after his father: He was Wright Aukenhead Edmundson, Junior. When my grandfather remarried, he sent all the children away, or the wicked stepmother did—the explanation was never clear to me. And, family legend has it, the first male child born to my father’s father and his new wife was named nothing other than Wright Aukenhead Edmundson, Junior.
So somewhere in life my father had a double, a doppelgänger, walking around. I have never heard of anything quite like this—not in literature, where some shrewd novelist might have made some hay with it, much less in life. But how could it have felt to my father? It was as though his father had all but declared that he had gotten it wrong the first time, wrong with this first Wright, who had been something like an inept rough draft, marred and ill-made, and that he would forget this blot of a boy and go on and try to replace him with something better. A more promising creature needed to be summoned out of the darkness to carry the name of Wright A., Senior. It was a symbolic form of infanticide, I suppose. Or maybe, to look at it with a less dramatic eye, a simple hedging of the bet: With two Juniors out there, the chances that someone who bore his name would amount to something would increase.
But suppose the two men ever met, which as far as I know they never did? Wouldn’t it be almost natural for them to fight to the death, to attack each other in some primal way? A Greek dramatist might have done something with this cruel happenstance—which could not possibly end well.
My father, disowned for no cause, no transgression of his own, was passed around from one sister to the next, then on to his brother, George, and his new wife. They doted on my father for his razory intelligence and his beautiful flute playing, but they had a family of their own. A strange, wayward, often charming younger brother didn’t fit.
He had to take care of himself too early, my father. He skipped stages, skipped steps, became externally a man while inwardly the boy was still there, waiting for the face of his mother to loom again like a gorgeous moon and to tell him that life was softer and more protected than in fact it would ever be. That he made it into adult-hood at all seems something of a triumph.
He may have played the flute exquisitely, but not well enough, he could see by the time he was seventeen, to make it into the Boston Symphony Orchestra. And if he could not be the best, why do it at all? He put the instrument aside.
He skipped school all the time and hung out in a poolroom and slipped back in for Latin class, because he liked it so much. He was president of the Latin club. He worked late at Perry’s restaurant and used to sleep through German, with the teacher’s approval. He was handsome then, and unbearably smart. He ran fast. He had bad teeth. Once, maybe twice, my uncle George pulled him from the Malden River, where he’d gotten caught in the weeds. He was called Boca, after a kind of coffee you could get back then, during the Depression. He could never remember how he’d gotten the nickname.
After years of double shifts cooking short order, my father got a job at Raytheon. I was about ten years old at the time. He was to be a janitor, but something a little better opened up; he became an inspector third class, looking over shipments fresh in at the loading dock. From there, he worked his way up to quality-control engineer, someone who hounded Raytheon’s contractors until they did their jobs to spec. He made missiles, mass-murdering weapons, and he once said he couldn’t believe all the time and energy that he and thousands of others put into making machines to destroy people. It was horrible, brutal. How could such a thing be so? Then he laughed in derision, as though someone else had been talking, and went on his way.
Money ran through his pockets, because once he was wound up, he needed to unspool himself—and that was not cheap. H
e could get by on two hours of sleep a night, then on Saturday he’d crash, like a copter falling dead out of the sky, and go unconscious for twelve hours straight. He blew up at people at work, called them geeks and morons to their faces. He never apologized. He laughed in nervous bursts. He loved small children. He was embarrassed by sex and by death. (After my sister died, I never heard him speak a word about her, though he had surely adored her.) He was virtually the only white man I knew growing up who never used the word nigger. I heard him swear only once in my life.
He had no time for a mis-made boy, beset with asthma—from his own Camels maybe—anxious, angry, strange. My father was living in a whirl of work and booze and sorrow and debt. He burned himself out, like a rag soaked in gasoline and wrapped round a stick, bright in the night air, and he died when he was fifty-five years old, not far from my age now. The last words of his I know of were words he wrote on a psychological evaluation that he had taken before he stepped into the car to drive home. On the way, his mind and body blew out in a fusillade of light and heat, a stroke and a heart attack at once. The assignment was to complete the sentence “A good father—.” My father had ended it with the phrase “loves his children.”
ONE NIGHT not long after I told him Lears’ verdict on TV, I was lying on the bed in my room listening to the radio. The Jefferson Airplane was telling me about how one pill can make you larger and one pill make you small but how the ones that Mama gives you don’t do anything at all, and trying to puzzle out what the words meant. Because Frank Lears had told us that they might mean something? Maybe so. On my wall was a poster of carousing Hell’s Angels, which I was staring at longingly.
“Hey, Mark,” my father said, poking his head through the door. “Why don’t you come in and catch the monologue?” Johnny was on. He was, maybe, wearing a Nehru suit; it was about that period. He’d be saying a few mildly derisive things about President Nixon.
“Nah,” I said. “I think I’ll skip it tonight.”
“It’s gonna be good. He’s supposed to do Carnak.” When Johnny did Carnak the Magnificent, he put a soothsayer’s turban on his head and draped himself in a flowing cape. Then he’d magically glean the contents of sealed envelopes and joke about them. The omniscience thing (writ small); my father loved it.
“That’s okay. Thanks anyhow.”
My father’s tone changed. “Then go to bed. You’re up way too late.”
“All right,” I said. Pointing out the contradiction—that it was not too late for Carson but was too late for the radio—would not have been wise. My father could detonate with any passing spark. As I slid into bed and turned out my Tensor lamp, radio turned not off but down low, I was not at all unhappy. In fact, I felt a certain inner glow.
My father was not easy for most people to read. He manifested many feelings—grief, fear, anxiety, even sometimes relative pleasure—in the form of anger. (On the day of my sister’s death, he had burst into a rage at me for no discernible reason.) But I had studied him for years in no little awe, the way lower animals who group around the water hole carefully memorize the habits of a near-dwelling lion, and I knew that in the gaps of his anger tonight there was a dose of pain. I had hurt his feelings. I! For just a passing moment, the first one that I could remember since the night I’d beaten him arm wrestling, I was one up. I felt mildly elated, freer; not half bad.
When I got up the next morning, very early, he was still on the couch, still watching TV. He greeted me cheerfully, all things considered. He told me that he had been awake through the night. Carson was fabulous. There had been a Bogart movie, then another, both peachy cockers. He told me this in great triumph, as though a masked ball, replete with celebrities and sirens and swords-men, famous statesmen, outlaw poets, and prodigious lovers, had taken place in our living room during the early hours and I had slept through the whole shebang. Then he heaved himself up and headed for the bathroom, for his morning ablutions. We had one bathroom, and he’d be in there, I knew, for about forty minutes. Until I figured out that drinking any liquids after say, seven o’clock, was a dumb thing to do at our house—until, that is, I was about ten—I spent many agonized interludes in front of the bathroom door while my father shaved and attacked his short-cropped hair, military style, with a pair of fast-flying brushes, saying all the while, like a genial torturer, “Just a sec, I’ll be done in just a sec.”
I went back to bed, turned on the radio, WMEX, and listened for a while to the Who and the Beatles and the Airplane, then fell back to sleep. When I woke up, my father was gone.
Chapter Five
FRANKLIN LEARS FIGHTS BACK
Mid-November came, the air went frigid, frost took hold of the ground, and Frank Lears apparently decided it was time to fight back.
For some time, Lears had played by the rules. He had tried to be a sane, dutiful teacher. He summarized the Durant book; he read it to us when need be. He asked us questions and bore with the silence when we said nothing. Sometimes, when Sandra was tapped out and Tom Buller was on the nod, the place was quiet for ten minutes at a time. All you could hear was the irregular pop of the classroom clock, which detonated like a tiny, eccentric bomb. Things became so dull that the sense of smell took preeminence from sight and hearing and we got lost in the aromas of very, very inexpensive perfume and hair spray—lots of that—and gym reek, from those who had kept the mandatory white socks on their feet and hadn’t changed their T-shirts after a wild game of crab soccer. (Get on your backs, face and belly toward the ceiling, and scuttle around on feet and palms trying to swat a part-dead volleyball into the space between two cones: Do this with fifty guys on a side in a small gym, Jimmy Brown’s worst nightmare, Dirty Ed Bush—“Go ahead. Kick him! Kick!”—presiding, and you will perspire.) Then after we had integrated the smells and flattened them out to nothing, to neutrality, as the sense will do for reasons of its own, we would relapse into light trances, docile, slouched, but also touchy, so that if a neighbor stirred us with an elbow or knee, we would leap at him in brief firecracker rage. And we would stare on and on at the clock as it did its funny jitterbug. We were starving Lears out, or trying to, we the herd without shepherd, who needed none, being free and certain in all that mattered. Soon he’d crack.
But I and the rest of us were in error. We had woefully underestimated our man. For unlike Miss Cullen of the stolen glasses, the purloined rank book, and the supply closet imprisonment, and Mr. Sweeney, of the flittering fingers and gushing invisible blood, and unlike even Mace Johnson, who never quite seemed sure that he was the one who should be leading the parade, invested as he was in higher authorities, always a little like an edgy noncom in search of the lieutenant, Frank Lears clearly thought extremely well of himself. And after a couple of months of our nonsense, he must have decided to hit back—though, to be sure, he fought us in a way that was entirely in our interest. But this much needs to be clear: He was fighting, taking some territory back.
He started by setting a trap. “Let me tell you a story,” he said one day apropos of nothing much. The story was about an experiment that had been conducted not long ago in New Haven, Connecticut, at Yale University. This installment of the experiment was a preamble, it was worth pointing out. The whole show was to climax in Germany. Americans would act as what the social psychologist in charge of the operation, a man named Stanley Milgram, thought of as the control group. (Much later, I would teach verse writing to Milgram’s daughter. “I’m sure you know about my father,” she said. I claimed innocence. “No,” she insisted. “Everyone who’s been to college knows about my father’s experiment”—which is more or less true. But we in Medford knew nothing whatever of the man.)
The experiment involved pain—inflicting pain. But the people who participated in the experiment did not know this. They came in off the streets volunteering for an experiment in pedagogy. They thought they were going to be teachers. When they got there, they met a large, pleasant man, who was the student. After a few preliminaries, the “student” d
isappeared into an adjoining room, while the “teacher,” directed by a supervisor in a lab coat, sat down in front of an impressive-looking console. The teacher understood that he was going to test the student on a memory exercise. The guy in the other room—the student—had to match terms accurately after hearing eight or ten pairs read to him in sequence just once. But the student was sometimes dull. He made mistakes. It was necessary to do something to enhance his concentration.
So when the learner made a mistake, he received a punishment—a jolt of electricity. Given a wrong answer, the teacher pushed a lever and administered a certain set voltage. With every mistake, the voltage rose. To some teachers this was a bit troubling. In the initial interview, the student, a man of about fifty, had claimed to have a heart condition. At three hundred volts, he began crying out about his heart “hurting.” The supervisor said to ignore it. The shocks were painful, he said, but they were not dangerous. As the teacher inflicted more and more voltage, the student in the other room cried louder.
Of course the cries were coming from a confederate, someone who was in on the experiment. No real pain was being inflicted, though the teacher didn’t know as much. When the teacher demurred about inflicting the pain, the supervisor would encourage him with a few words: It’s all right. Go ahead. Don’t worry. On many occasions, the arrow went into the red zone. Screams came from the adjoining room. Then, after the teacher reached 350 volts, there was no noise whatever. The lab supervisor encouraged the teacher to keep posing the questions. When the student didn’t reply after five seconds, he got another dose. The top dose was five hundred volts.
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