It was at this time that I inserted a truly masterful stroke into my contest with him: I feigned an actual physical fear of him. Prior to entering a room, I would stick my un shaven face around corners, “peeking,” and if he were present, I would snap my head fearsomely back, as though his presence represented an unfathomable danger. On one or two occasions I heard him ask my mother, “What the hell was that all about?” And I chuckled gleefully. But there was never any victory in my laughter. When he asked, his voice reflected amused perplexity more than anger. There were times when avoiding a confrontation with him proved impossible; we would meet in the dim-lighted hallway or coming to and from the can. At these times I would fix on my face a look of utter incredulity, as though to say, “Oh, you live here, too?” or, “My, my, this house is just full of odd little surprises.” It is no easy admission, but I know precisely what I wanted him to do. I wanted to provoke him into some unpleasantry, infuriate him into striking me or kicking me in the ass. I yearned to run into Mummy’s arms and shriek, “You see, Mummy, the brute you’re married to?” I desired to have Mummy defend me against him and thereby receive verbal assurance that I was welcome at the farm. But I underestimated my man. For that is what he was, a man, and as such would not be drawn into any such asinine and infantile games as these. What was worse— oh, the sad, incredible insidiousness of sickness—was that I was never unwelcome at the farm.
During the final weeks of autumn it was only during the football games that I permitted myself the company—if company it can be called—of either my mother or stepfather, having by then taken to spending all my waking hours (and daily these had become fewer and fewer) lying in my room, with Christie III at my feet, spinning my fantasy of owning the Giants. In direct proportion to the extent of my isolation, the fantasy grew increasingly elaborate and by now had me ad ministering something called the New York Giant Foundation, curing cancer, a patron to indigent writers and painters
(my dreams weren’t entirely selfish), my table now occupied by the world’s great and near-great, the De Gaulles and Jonas Salks.
On one of these Sunday afternoons my stepfather took his only overt action against me. In deference to my mother, whose eyes over the weeks had gone from astonished alarm to the myopic squint of pain, I would on these Sundays take what had become for me a weekly shower and shave and sit with them through a silent meal of pot roast. Rising from the table and entering the living room well before game time, I would snap on the television and begin pacing up and down my mother’s lovely hooked rug. My stepfather, Sunday cigar in mouth, joined me first, taking his easy chair. On finishing the dishes, my mother, followed by Christie III—the latter having gorged himself on the scraps—walked into the room and took her place on the davenport. Christie III sat next to her. Everyone nodded demurely at each other. Everyone was ready for the show that began with the kickoff. While my stepfather smiled and my mother laughed, and poor Christie III, his sad saucer-like brown eyes fearfully following every move I made, licking his chops apprehensively, his neck sunk in his shoulders, huddled in the protective warmth of my mother as if about to get the thrashing of his life, I ran about the room with the desperate, stored-up energy of the endless week—hurling either bloody oaths or heartfelt benedictions at Quarterback Conerly, cursed him or praised him according to the character of his game. On third and long-yardage plays, I dropped to my knees, made the Catholic sign at forehead and chest, and, depending on the team’s success or lack of it, rose and cast holy water on the tube or fell to the floor, pulled my hair, swooned, and hurled unadulterated blasphemies at the gods. Whenever the Giants appeared particularly inept, and I found myself rolling speechless with rage about the heavy wool rug, I would jump suddenly up, dash to the telephone, feign pick ing up the receiver, and screech, “Get me Yankee Stadium!” The hysteria in my voice suggested no less than that I was about to discharge the entire organization en masse.
During these Sunday afternoons my mother said little save cautioning me to watch my heart; but one afternoon my step father, having become aware over the weeks of my inordinate partiality to Gifford, took what I considered his initial gesture against me, what I deemed to be little short of an assault upon my person. In retrospect, I know he said it only in fairness, perhaps only in the hope of engaging me in a conversation, which in all those weeks we had never had. “You know, Fred,” he said, “there are other players in the league as good as Gifford.” I froze in mid-step and turned to him with menacing slowness. I slammed my hands onto my hips. With a look of utter incredulity on my face, I snarlingly demanded that he repeat his filthy assertion. “I said,” he said, smiling weakly, already sensing that his efforts to be engaging were somehow going awry, “that there are other players in the league as good as—” Refusing to permit him to finish, I turned savagely to my mother and fixed on my face a look of crushing hurt, a look with which I meant to say, “You see, Mummy? He’s struck! The beast in him has finally revealed itself!” Turning back to him, my voice tremulous with rage, I shouted, “As good as Gifford? As good as Gifford?” Emitting a mocking, scornful laugh, just before fleeing the room, I added, “You, sir, are crazy!”
It was an hour or better before, lying on my bed, I felt my heart quiet to a temperate beat. When it did, I found that replaying the mad scene in my mind’s eye I could laugh— which was a beginning. After a long time Christie III mustered the courage to come upstairs and join me. For many moments he sat on the end of the bed, his droopy ears still back in trepidation. When finally I spoke gently to him, he walked cautiously and wide-legged across the softness of the mattress (the way Dana describes “salts” boarding a schooner), bent his head down, and began lapping tentatively at my hot face. Sensing his prudence, I wilted, felt again my terrible rage, and began a laughter close to tears. For some days now I had been hearing the muted whispers below me, and through them the words sick and psychiatrist and hospital, and had been meaning to make a journey into my past in search of my nemesis, who was Bunny Sue, or who I foolishly thought was Bunny Sue. I wanted to make the journey because I was terribly ashamed by what seemed the explicitness of it all. Over and over again I heard myself saying to a psychiatrist, “Look, it’s very simple: I was rejected by a girl, Miss America,” to which, with a suave smile, he invariably replied, “You look: we’ve all been rejected by a girl. So what else is new?” As nothing is ever this simple, I should not have feared the journey. Feeling Christie III warm up to the job of lapping my face, I did let my laughter run to tears, thinking that I had instilled fear in the helpless mutt. Picking him gently up, I rolled him round and round on my chest in our game, letting him growl and snap toothlessly at my now wet face. When he was quiet, and asleep in my arms, I went back into the past.
I went back to Chicago and replayed the memory of it; it was that day I first sensed that I had never loved Bunny Sue—I could not even put her features together—and that my inability to couple had not been with her but with some aspect of America with which I could not have lived successfully. Re playing everything I could remember about Chicago, I under stood that had I mingled with that womb I never would have had the strength to walk away. Concluding with the mental rereading of her childish letters, I laughed heartily at the thought of my being saved by the dash—and the exclamation point! I liked that joke very much. It was the one with which I hoped to break the ice with the psychiatrists. I didn’t know then that one doesn’t approach these doctors with levity; or that, on discovering this, I would end by telling them hardly anything about myself. But, having discovered the joke, I was now ready to face them; to go to Loony Lodge or wherever it was my mother wanted me to go; ready to do anything to alleviate the awful tensions I had created at that once-quiet farm.
During my final weeks at the farm I did an odd thing, scarcely knowing at the time why. Though I now presume I created this room that I might one day come back and put down these words, I was unquestionably distraught at being deemed insane and was avoiding, as long as possible
, being locked up. For that is what I did: I created a room. An upstairs room in an early addition to the south side of the house, its ceiling, save for a five-foot strip running down the middle of the room, slopes down at the hazardous angle of the roof; and from where I am now sitting (for I did come back) I can reach up and touch the rouge wallpaper which I myself put on. The room is twenty by twenty. When, not long before I left for the hospital, I began remaking it, it was used for storage. Piled high with trunks, broken baby carriages, and cardboard boxes containing the sad, accumulated refuse of my mother’s life, the place was ugly and melancholy, being sprinkled daily with a plaster which made its way through split layers of wallpaper and, falling to the floor in great chunks, detonated, laying a heavy gray fallout over all. Rolling up my sleeves and taking a deep breath, I one day began, to the dismay of my mother (for there was no other place in the house for the refuse), moving the junk out and tearing the wallpaper and plaster from the walls and ceiling. When I had the room stripped bare, my stepfather had little choice but to buy me the plaster, wallpaper, and paint to put it back together again. I expect he didn’t mind. After I had spent so many months on the davenport, it must have been a welcome sight to see me doing anything at all; indeed, such was the fury with which I worked—and like most men who don’t know why they work at what they do, I worked with a fury that prevented my asking why—that after a time, as if caught up in the vortex of my lunacy, both my mother and stepfather started working with me, helping me. Though I felt them intruders, I daren’t say so. When we had finished, I thought it the most beautiful room I had ever seen.
Beneath the grayness of time, the floor turned out to be the original. Made up of wide (one of them measures two feet across), liberally knotted pine boards, the floor was stunning after I had sanded it and applied a clear Tungseal finish. Behind where I am now sitting, at the south end of the room and twisting up between its only two windows (deeply recessed, curtained now, and from which one almost always gets a cooling breeze from the direction of Lake Ontario), runs the upper part of the living room fireplace, its great, ponderous limestones exposed where for hour on endless hour I scraped away buckets of plaster, coughing, gagging, and nearly throw ing up as I did so. I furnished the room with a dresser, a single bed, a dry sink, and a schoolmaster’s desk, all of an old pine that finished beautifully. My proudest possession was a great, low pine table which I fitted with an old horse-carriage seat and which I intended to use as desk and chair. At a later Christmas when I hadn’t any money, I gave the schoolmaster’s desk to my infant sons to be used, opening as it does like a trunk, for their toys; and by the time they will be old enough to appreciate the work that went into it, in their innocence they will have wrecked it and it will have long since been consigned to the junk yard. Deciding (and I can hardly blame her) that I was a “traveling man” unmindful of and embarrassed by the permanent character of furniture, my sister took the pine table and carriage seat for her own house; and when I finally came to put down these words, I had to fashion a new desk from an old pine kitchen table. My mother added a rust-colored plaid rug, a ponderous, old-fashioned gray couch, and a television set. Then I added the finishing touches.
In front of me now, flush against my writing table, is a great oak beam unknown to houses being built today, on which sit the forty or so volumes now constituting my library, everything from McKelway’s True Tales from the Annals of Crime and Rascality to Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy. Scotch-taped to the wall above the books are two pieces of paper bearing legends. The upper one, the smaller, is a rejection slip from the editors of The New Yorker for some brief pieces I sent to their “Talk of the Town” department. Until I recently re turned here, I had completely forgotten writing them. The letter is not unkind. It says that, though they cannot use the material, they are no less grateful on that account and hope I continue to think of them in the future (I did—with no better luck). The other piece of paper seems more remote to me; and if I could understand it, I think I could understand the man I was then a good deal better than I do now. Typewritten in capital letters on a piece of eight-by-eleven bond paper (yellowing now and heaving and bubbling under the Scotch tape), it reads: “do not take counsel of your fears.” It is not an original saying with me; it is a motto I picked up someplace and that must somehow have seemed to give me comfort for the months of hospitalization that were ahead. At the time, too, I’m sure I had some vague dream of doing something absolutely Wilsonian. Instead of reading systematically through the literature of socialism, as he must have done to make his To the Finland Station, I expect I was going to read through the literature of football and write my To the Yankee Stadium (though I would have had an extra foot unless I pronounced the latter stad-yum). If that, or something equally absurd, were my motive, I never did anything about it. On finishing the room in early spring, I returned to the davenport; and my days at the farm were numbered then.
In those final days I withdrew from my stepfather my arch and unwarranted hostility and began talking with him whenever I could, both during supper and in the living room when the commercials were blaring away. He was a strong man in every way, and a good man, and that strength had not been acquired in pursuit of the dollar but for the reasons most decent men grow strong: by meeting the needs of those people close to them. He had raised one large family of his own, gone now their various ways in the world. He had then married my mother, taking on the responsibility for her family. In his love he had given her this lovely stone farmhouse, a home she might never have otherwise had. It was a home to which her own children, whether hard-used by the world or coming back to display the laurels received from it (and we were not all losers), might return and, if only momentarily, remember that they had been children together when neither success nor failure mattered nearly so much as popcorn and fudge on a Sun day evening.
Over the next few years, as I was in and out of the hospital and was (in secondhand suits from the Salvation Army and the Catholic Charities) making tentative and awkward at tempts to use teaching as an entrance back into the world, my stepfather and I spent much time together, and things were never better between us than on autumn Sunday afternoons. Though he always had had a great affection for sports, he had been a neutral observer interested more in the game than in loyalty to a single team. But after a time, hardly noticeable at first, he caught something of my enthusiasm for the beauty and permanent character of staying with someone through victory and defeat and came round to the Giants. When after many years and many autumn Sundays, he died, he did so at that high and exhilarating moment just prior to the kickoff. Seated on the edge of the davenport watching the starting line-ups being introduced, he closed his eyes, slid silently to the floor, and died painlessly of a coronary occlusion.
One day I packed a small bag, and the three of us, along with Christie III, piled into the car and began the journey to the hospital—a journey I thought would take three weeks, at the most three months, and which ended by taking three years. It took so long because there were so many things I didn’t then know, didn’t even know what Shakespeare knew three hundred years ago: that one cannot “minister to the mind diseased,” that “therein the patient cures himself.” No, I had no idea that I would have to experience and later articulate a rage against the insensitive quacks; that I would then have to go to Avalon Valley; that I would have to listen for the devil within the Negro; that I would have to feel the strength of Dr. K.; that I would have to hear the sobbing of others to make my own self-pity seem trivial and contemptible in the extreme; that I would have to see Paddy the Duke minister to himself; that I would have to make my peace with this new and different man; and that, walking round and round The New Parrot Restaurant, I would finally have to say, “I want to live.” No, that day in the car I was buoyed up with that typically sham American optimism and had blissful dreams of miraculous cures and overnight remedies, believed that in a matter of days I’d be calling home and proclaiming, “Maw! I’m okay, Maw! Bake an a
pple pie!”
At the swank hospital I kissed my old buddy, Christie III, who made a terrible commotion. I kissed my mother, who looked tired and pained and who wept quietly. Then I shook hands with my stepfather. His strong hand was limp and uncertain, as though he didn’t know how we stood, and he turned quickly away from me and descended the concrete steps. I wanted to call to him then, to tell him I was sorry for so many things. I wanted to do this, for I had suddenly seen that the pain I had caused my mother had become his pain, and that that pain bound us together as much as ever filial affection does, that, in a way, he was my father now. But I hadn’t the strength to call after him. Instead, I turned and went quickly into the insane asylum.
6 / Who? Who? Who is Mr. Blue?
In the autumn of , during the final weeks of my initial stay at Avalon Valley, the ones in which I had lived in such an apprehension of the future, and in which I had, save at the AA meetings, lost interest in Paddy the Duke, I had had, one Sun day, a visitor. Thinking it to be a member of my family, I had hung on my face a look of monumental aggrievance and had charged out the door prepared to attack—if only because they were outside and I in. It was standard operating procedure with patients, and expected, a protest that one was as sane as the Pope and that one’s incarceration was all a dreadful joke. In the parking lot I saw only an attractive girl with roan-colored hair, dressed in a camel’s-hair coat, leaning against a steel-gray Mercedes 0 SL convertible. If in the dismal world of Avalon Valley she did not look obscenely ostentatious, she looked singular indeed. Scanning the parking lot while mouthing my pleasant salutation—”When the hell yuh gonna get me outa here?”—it suddenly occurred to me, with an alarming and jolting tightening of the body, that the girl was my visitor, that I not only knew her but that I had once, in my half-assed and cursory manner, paid her a kind of court. Taking a deep breath, I turned, smiled embarrassedly, and said, “Hello.” My voice was somewhat hysterical, still containing that element of histrionic indignation with which I had planned to greet my relatives.
A Fan's Notes Page 23
