I was old enough to imagine sex, and when mother became pregnant with Baby Bart, I was astonished. How could a man as morose and distant as our dad possibly arouse himself enough to have, much less enjoy, sex? But when Bartholomew was bom, Dad’s spirits sank even lower. And that amazed me, too. He ignored Baby Bart pretty much as he ignored the rest of us. He would sit in his underwear, smoking his cigarettes, staring into the blue nicotine haze. From across a room, I sometimes stared into this haze, too, trying to fathom the vision that had paralyzed his spirit.
We gave him time. But as the years passed, he became more sullen and withdrawn. He acted as if nothing around him had a real existence, including his wife and children. We were just smoky shapes drifting around him and sometimes pestering the quiet, empty spaces that occupied his reverie. The things he had seen in Europe had hollowed out the once-substantial elements of his prewar world. Then one day he packed a single suitcase and left home without a word of explanation, apology, or good-bye.
After a few months, Mother gave up on him. Then she, too, became sullen and indifferent. I didn’t know if she was just bitter for being abandoned or if the emptiness of my father had been a contagious thing that had infected her, too. She put on weight, and the heavier she got, the more distracted and heedless of the world around her she became. I looked for signs of it in Woodrow and myself, and even in Baby Bart. Could the same thing infect us? I struck poses in the bathroom mirror that reminded me of my father. I pushed my belly out, wondering if it could bloat. I imagined myself empty, and, imagining it, I felt it. Something solid but invisible rose up from my legs, gathered momentum, and assaulted my stomach and chest. It flew into my throat. My mouth fell open and I heard it screech over my tongue and past my teeth. My heart tripped and hammered against its bony confinement. I broke a sweat. I wanted to run, but a cold paralysis held me in its grip.
“What’s the matter with you, Bernard?” my mother asked through the bathroom door, tapping it lightly. It was a dutiful question, something a mother would ask. But it was empty of care. “Are you getting sick, Bernard?”
“No, I’m not getting sick,” I said. I told her that I was only laughing. “I just remembered a joke,” I said, my face in the toilet, the gleaming wet porcelain hollowing out my words until they became brittle shells of sound.
2. INTRUDERS
Time drained some of Mother’s bitterness away. She began to have dates now and then. The men she dated seemed generally lifeless to me. I would watch Mother and her dates sitting at the kitchen table over beer and potato chips talking in bored voices about weather or work or relatives. One man named Roger Spydell I remember because of his greenish complexion and his busy, nicotine-stained fingers. He would drum the table impatiently when listening to Mother, and when he talked, his fingers would punch little emphatic holes in the air. Roger drove a long black Packard Eight that drifted down our street like an ebony coffin that had been accidentally launched into a slow river. Mother and Roger would sit in the big car together in the driveway after a date, talking with their mouths almost shut and staring out the windshield as if at the dead immensity of the finite space immediately in front of them. Sometimes they would go into her bedroom, and Woodrow and I would listen at the door, but we heard nothing but the close-mouthed mutter of indifferent conversation, or the slow breathing of sleepers.
Another man she dated was critical of nearly everything. His caustic remarks would descend, in stages, from the loftier subjects of the national government and the state of public morality to the little things he found personally offensive in his everyday life. Criticism was the only form of expression that gave him the appearance of having purpose and energy. When the subject of conversation was not open to criticism, he became inarticulate and confused or openly bored. Words, to him, were cruelly sharp instruments to be used only for cutting away the fat from the lean, and sometimes the lean from the bone. He once actually said that criticism was his gift. He said this with a self-congratulatory smile. He looked as though he was waiting for someone to pin a medal on him.
A man I remember only as “Pincher” seemed, at first, to be full of life and good fun. He was a big pink man with a round hairless head. He was always winking at us and sticking his tongue into his cheek as if everything he observed was a joke. He brought us gifts. He brought Woodrow an imitation samurai sword he’d bought in Tokyo during the Occupation. He gave me a Red Ryder BB rifle, and he gave Baby Bart a Japanese doll-bank with a head that unscrewed. We called him Pincher because he liked to give us pinches. He pinched Woodrow and he pinched me. He pinched Mother until she begged him to stop. He gave Baby Bart little pinches in his crib until he screamed. Pincher pinched expertly and he pinched hard. Once I looked at the back of my arm and saw the blue imprint of his thumb and forefinger. When Woodrow cried after one of his pinches, he said, “Don’t be a baby, Woodrow. Maybe you ought to be in the crib with Bartholomew. Or maybe you don’t want to be a man someday.” He laughed when he said this, as if the notion tickled him.
Though I was several years older than Woodrow, Pincher made me cry once, too. I turned away from him so that he wouldn’t see the quick well of tears in my eyes, but he forced me to face him. Then he winked, stuck his tongue into his cheek, and tousled my hair. One day I accidentally caught Mother coming out of the bathroom in her underwear and saw that her arms and shoulders, as well as her thighs, were leopard-spotted with blue and yellowing welts.
About this time a shy bully at school named Dolph Hubler singled me out to be his latest victim. At fifteen I wasn’t as big or as courageous as I wanted to be. I was a disappointment to myself at five feet seven inches tall and one hundred and thirty pounds. Dolph, who had been set back two grades, was man-sized. He was close to six feet and probably weighed two hundred pounds. He was big and clumsy and forced by his parents to wear faded bib overalls and oversized oxblood wingtip shoes that were obvious hand-me-downs from his father or older brothers. Dolph wasn’t a natural bully, but had been forced into the role because of the sly smirks his appearance aroused. To keep these smirks at a respectful distance, Dolph would single someone out now and then in random reprisal.
Dolph would look for me in the crowd of kids loitering in the school yard before the first bell. When he found me, he’d slap the books out of my hands and then show me, and whoever else might be interested, his big raw fist. He made the top middle knuckle protrude as if introducing me to it. Then he would punch my shoulder hard enough to jar my collarbone. The first time he did this I was so stunned and panic-stricken that I couldn’t talk or move. Filled with a sick dread I hadn’t known before, I smiled at him. My smile was irrational since it had no bearing on my true inner state. Dolph towered over me, annoyed by this inappropriate smile that did not credit his power to instill fear. He had the body of a middle-aged beer drinker. His ears were big and fleshy, and when he walked, he waddled from side to side, the palms of his hands facing backwards, apelike.
Everyone was afraid of him. Each morning when he approached, my friends would drift away as if they had pressing business on the other side of the school yard. None of them wanted to show partisanship for me, knowing that such a foolhardy gesture could only attract attention to themselves as a possible source of future victims.
I ran with a clique of intrinsically cautious boys who liked to pose in rugged approximations of James Dean, Marlon Brando, and Aldo Ray, hoping to distract one another from the discouraging truth about themselves. They would slouch in groups, thumbs hooked insolently into the belt loops of their Levi’s, saying, “Well, then, there now,” in the breezy, dreamy way James Dean said it in Rebel Without a Cause. They would repeat this phrase to each other tirelessly, as if it were real conversation, packs of Chesterfields, Camels, or Lucky Strikes rolled into the sleeves of their T-shirts. Though they moaned at passing girls with the sexual menace of Marlon Brando, they would marry the first or second girl they slept with. They were in love with safety. After high school, they would pursue colle
ge deferments from the draft. They would plan sensible careers. And they would do nothing to attract attention to themselves, knowing instinctively that Dolph Hubler existed in the world as a principle, a mindlessly vengeful force, darkly determined to inflict pain and humiliation at random, but always gravitating to the most visible targets.
Dolph Hubler put a serious crimp in the safe allegiances I was in the process of adopting. Dolph was my first crisis in personal relationships. There was no way around him. I couldn’t put him out of my mind. I dreamed about him. In one of my dreams we went fishing together. We were wading in a stream. Suddenly I realized the fishing trip had been a ruse. Neither of us had fishing poles. He was going to drown me. I saw it in his face as he waded towards me. I woke up, fighting for high ground.
Dolph homed in on me each morning, knuckle upraised, his small colorless eyes unblinking. My cringe was internal, not visible, but Dolph perceived it anyway and rejoiced in it. Outwardly I pretended that the morning ritual between us was all in good fun and that his shoulder punches were not a great inconvenience. He would hit me and I would say, “Well, then, there now, Dolph,” in the casual, unhurried manner of James Dean. It was the way I had chosen to save face. All my friends approved of it. “Attaway, Bemie,” said one of them, his voice manfully hoarse in the whispering style of Aldo Ray. “You showed that pissant, Bernie.” Such congratulations were offered, of course, only after Dolph had lumbered out of earshot.
The trouble with my strategy, though, was that while it was face-saving to me, it was frustrating to Dolph. He needed to strip me of my James Dean front and expose me to our wide audience as a sissy, even as a crybaby. And so he increased the force of his punches until my lower lip began to tremble under the easy anarchy of my cool smile. He made an ear-piercing falling-bomb whistle to dramatize the ballistic arc of his punch and then the bomb-blast boom when the red knuckle sank into my shoulder deep enough to knock bone. I felt my well-greased hair lifted by impact into comical arrangements. My shoulder became a blue disaster zone of pulverized meat.
Mother’s latest boyfriend was a tiny, wiry man named Ducky Tillinghast. Ducky was smaller than me, but he radiated toughness. He’d been in the navy for twenty years and had once been featherweight champ of the Sixth Fleet. Somehow he’d caught wind of my difficulties with Dolph Hubler. One evening, after we’d all had dinner together, he took me aside. “Bullies are almost always yellow, Bernard,” he said somberly. “I say almost always because you never know for sure. There’s the chance that you have drawn the one in ten who is everything he says he is. But I guarantee you, son, most of them are pushovers when you deal with them properly. Why do you think he picked you, someone half his size?”
Ducky gave me a ten-minute boxing lesson I didn’t want. I had no intention of hitting Dolph Hubler back. As I watched Ducky holding up his little fists and shuffling his feet around, I felt a large surge of contempt. Dolph Hubler could pick Ducky up by the nape of his neck and throw him over the school yard fence. It was ludicrous to me, this pint-size man encouraging me to fight a monster the two of us together wouldn’t have been able to handle. I guess I was sneering a little at him, but he paid no attention to it.
“You set up the right with the left,” he said, pawing at the air. “You stick stick stick with the left, then you come over and stake him with the right.” He danced in front of me like a midget Sugar Ray Robinson. He showed me how to make a left jab snap like a flicked whip and how to put body weight into my right. He finally took note of my halfhearted and somewhat disrespectful attitude. It bothered him. We were out in the backyard. He offered me a cigarette. We smoked and talked in the dark among the throbbing crickets. “Look, Bernard,” he said after a while. “I can show you a thousand tricks, but if you don’t have the belly for a fight, then none of them can help you.”
I hated him suddenly. I was glad it was too dark for him to see how red my face had become or how my lip was quivering.
“I’ll tell you this, though, Bernard,” he said. “If you let it go on, you will eat so much dirt that eventually you will come to think it’s the only item on the menu. The world is already full of men like that.”
I saw Mother frowning at the cigarette in my hand. She was at the kitchen window, doing the dishes. I took a deep drag, making the burning tip glow brightly so that it would illuminate my face, which was again placid with contempt.
“What do you have to lose, Bernard?” Ducky said.
I pictured the things I had to lose. I saw my teeth sprinkled on the asphalt school yard. I saw my ripped shirt spotted with red. And I saw worse. I saw Dolph dragging me around the school yard by my ankles as girls in their crisp skirts and saddle shoes giggled with forbidden excitement. It was clear to me that I had an awful lot to lose. My friends would understand this. They were going to live by an understanding of it all their lives. They had already become experts in their midteens at cutting their losses. They were learning very quickly how to face the world with a handy smile while the world beat them slowly into pablum.
So, when I actually hit Dolph Hubler, no one was more surprised than me. I’d already decided that endurance was a greater virtue than the will to retaliate. I’d simply outlast Dolph. He’d get bored eventually and find someone more promising. But one morning my fake James Dean indifference suddenly collapsed. Dolph was especially disgruntled with my passive acceptance of his ballistic punches, so he doubled the force and the rate of delivery until he was panting with effort. I felt myself caving in. Something terrible was about to happen— I was going to cry or run away or beg him to stop. To prevent this, I dipped my shoulder away from his falling fist. This small act of resistance alarmed him. He wasn’t ready for it. His big, heavily freckled face sagged with surprise. Before I fully understood the movement that dipping my shoulder had started, my left hand was flicking at his nose. It snapped like a whip, just as Ducky said it would. As I jabbed, I rotated my fist so that when it struck, it punished. This was also one of Ducky’s many techniques. The feel of soft, yielding flesh under my knuckles was a revelation to me. It was equivalent in magnitude to my discovery two years earlier of masturbation. It was a new, illicit pleasure of the body.
Surprise continued to mount in Dolph’s face. Then it began to change into horror. His hands hung helplessly at his sides, paralyzed by this impossible turn of events. I took the opportunity to step towards him. My right foot planted, I was able to put my entire body weight into my right hand. It bounced off his nose with a wet, meaty thump. Dolph sat down slowly, like a man stopping in a wilderness to reconsider the path he’d chosen. A shining rope of blood twisted from his nose. Tears rolled from his eyes.
My friends congratulated me loudly, but their praise was tempered by dismay. An element of disapproval undermined the barking shouts that celebrated my victory. Eventually they drifted away from me. I was no longer one of them. I was untrustworthy, perhaps dangerous. I began to associate with a new, rowdier group. They were grittier than my old friends, but they hadn’t been gritty enough to challenge Dolph Hubler.
Exposed now for what he was, Dolph became the school clown. My new friend, Art Bannister, humiliated Dolph on a daily basis. He would punch Dolph on the arms or stomach and make him cry. Art declared one morning to an audience of hooting girls from the seedier section of town that Dolph would be their “Slave For a Day.” He would carry their books when asked, he would run petty errands, he would open doors, and he would bow when commanded to do so. Dolph Hubler in his oversized oxblood wingtip hand-me-downs became a living joke. How this flabby, stupidly dressed dork had ever been feared was so great a mystery that we could only deal with it by forgetting it. His past freedom to evoke terror was simply erased from the collective school yard memory.
3. GEMS
Shortly after Mother broke up with Ducky Tillinghast, she took a job as hostess in a restaurant called Chez Frenchy. Her salary wasn’t much, but she did very well in tips. Chez Frenchy was owned by Frenchy Bigelow, a tall, hairy, slopesh
ouldered man who liked to wear jewelry, especially diamonds. He had a diamond stick pin, a wristwatch with diamond hours, a large signet ring with a diamond center, and a pinky ring with a big sapphire in it.
Frenchy liked to talk. He told me all about precious stones. Rare gems, he said, are connected intimately to the history of the world. The ancients believed some rare stones had medical properties. The Arabs and Hebrews, for example, considered the camelian to be an important prophylactic. The breastplate of the Hebrew highpriests were studded with topaz, beryl, onyx, ruby, emerald, sapphire, agate, amethyst, and jasper. Caesar paid the equivalent of ten million dollars for a single pearl. Caligula adorned his horse with a collar of walnut-size pearls. “But the diamond,” Frenchy said, “is the king of rare stones. It has made and broken empires, caused heads to roll, made billionaires of common men. The Koh-I-Noor diamond, for instance, was believed by the Sultan Baber of the Moguls to be equal in worth to the entire world!”
He also said that he’d been in the French resistance during the war. He’d been a right-hand man to Pierre-Michel Rayon, the famous underground leader. He had an autographed picture of Rayon. The picture looked as if it had been tom out of a magazine and the autograph was an unreadable corkscrew of blue ink. Frenchy was a friendly man who liked to recount his wartime experiences, when he was not reciting the histories of rare stones. The war fascinated me and I liked to listen to him tell about it. He said that he’d been responsible for blowing up three German tanks and an entire railroad bridge, complete with supply train. He said he killed an SS colonel with his bare hands. He showed me his large hairy hands and closed them slowly into fists, demonstrating their lifeextinguishing power. He regarded these lethal fists with a melancholy that spoke of war’s enduring sorrow. He told me how to make a bomb out of a mixture of sugar, acid, and calcium chlorate that could be used to incinerate a German staff car. He explained how to determine the structural weaknesses of railroad trestles. He recalled fondly the selfless courage of the Parisian graffiti artists who covered sidewalks, monuments, and the walls of buildings with brilliantly comic insults to the Third Reich. Frenchy’s best friend had been executed in the street after being caught painting a Cross of Lorraine on the door of Gestapo headquarters.
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