Ice cracks. It melts and offers, whole and preserved, sailors buried in permafrost along the Arctic islands. The flesh on their bodies is startling, intimate. The Arctic anthropologists are awed, silenced by their finds, by the sad flesh preserved, gifts of the ice.
During the autopsies performed by the doctors who have set up tents on the gray stony tundra in Arctic summer—the place so flat, so vast, one cannot tell where the earth ends and the sky begins—the exhumed's perfect, one-hundred-fifty-year-old faces are napkin-covered, as if to shield them from their own undoing.
Some of the sailors’ descendants have been allowed to come along. Outside the tent, they finger the buttons on the jackets of their dead, the jackets and trousers and shoes that have been laid out in the Midnight Sun in the shapes of the men who wore them.
The buttons on the jackets are silver. One descendant asks, may he keep one? He's aware of a change in himself. He weeps without embarrassment before the camera. He says that to look into the face of his relative is to see his own, and his children.
Well, fine, Dante leers up at me a long watery grin through the ages. That's “sweet.” But the ice in Caina, Antenora? This ice will never, ever eric…
I can translate about three lines of the canto at a time before I must take a break, slipping carefully down under the covers so as not to knock dictionaries, drafts, my copy of the Inferno from the bed.
Dozing, waking to translate a few more lines, I begin to tire of Dante, his unequivocal ice, his righteousness, the way he goes carelessly over the lake kicking the heads riveted there.
No wonder they snarl at him. Fuck him, I think, and laugh at myself for the first time in weeks. I say it aloud. “Fuck Dante and his fucking Inferno.”
My voice rings through the empty rooms.
During the last year with Stephen I'm afraid I have joined him in his foul mouth. It's something Stan has come to hate about me. Certainly, before all the trouble, I was a reasonable, benevolently manipulative post-sixties mom suggesting to my children that they “save the four-letter words for appropriate occasions. Otherwise,” I'd coo, “they lose their power.”
In the event that one or the other's judgments regarding “appropriate occasions” faltered, the boys were fined a nickel for the initial offense, a dime for the next, and so on, a sort of monetary Richter scale approach to the problem.
But when things began to slide with Stephen, he laughed at my solution, reached into his pockets, and tossed dollar bills at me. Where did the money come from?
“Appropriate occasion, Mom?” he sneered. “That's every fucking minute of my life.”
From my bedroom I can look down the hall and into Stephen's room, exactly as he left it, on the wall facing me a huge poster of Malcolm X with the caption, “By Any Means Necessary,” the only noise from there, his hamster on his wheel.
One evening as I'm working with the translation, eating something from a can, I realize that the wheel has gone silent. The animal Stephen has named for a famous surfer lies on the floor of his cage. The right side of his head is horribly swollen. He looks to struggle to right himself. I reach into the cage and try to set him on his feet but he falls to the side again and again.
Filling a syringe with a bit of water, sugar, and a codeine tablet, I hold the little flailing thing and inject the liquid into his mouth. After a few minutes he quiets.
I take him back to bed with me, place him on my chest, and lie back. When I wake he's dead.
I keep him with me awhile, examine him closely, sadly, the way one could never examine a body were it alive. I pry open his mouth to see the fine teeth, the tiny perfect tongue, his pouches full of food; he who was born, lived, and died in a cage, who meant little to his owner, this animal being a replacement for a previous beloved hamster named Fergie.
When that animal died, not unlike this one, of a massive swelling of the right eye—some sort of hemorrhage, perhaps—Stephen had grieved as intensely and openly as one would expect of this child.
So Fergie's death was surrounded by pomp and ritual, including a secret burial under a yew tree at the front of our apartment house—secret because the landlords forbid pets in the apartment. If they visited for any reason, we put Fergie's elaborate bright orange-and-yellow plastic Habitrail in the bathtub with the shower curtain drawn and the door closed.
Stephen even chose a tombstone, a piece of hand-sized black shale we'd brought back from Cornwall, and he wrote on the stone, in white-out, Fergie's name and death date.
Stephen had never attended a funeral, and so when I asked him to speak a few words over Fergie's grave—in a downpour, by the way, though we were protected under the huge yew—Stephen confused grief, as many of us do, with shame, and began confessing things—that he had smoked cigarettes, stolen money from my purse, that he had touched a girl on her breasts.
I doze again, dream in two languages … per ch'oi mi volsi e vidimi davante /e sotto i piedi un lago gelo / avea di vetro e non d'acqua sembiante … fall through the high drift, the cloud regions of the bells of medieval Italian to the jackhammer pounding of late-twentieth-century American English, the hamster on my chest.
Spring, 1992
Where do the guns come from?
I'm driving home, down from Portsmouth, Newbury-port. I've been looking for houses to rent, houses away from the city and its gangs and guns, but close enough for me to commute into work in Medford.
Where do they come from?
Stephen will be returning to me at the end of spring semester. He is in more trouble than ever. His father has thrown up his hands.
It's early April, a Sunday. Up from Providence. Nothing. Traffic, raining. Houses beat up, or the rent's too high. But I will find something. Sooner or later I will find a house for us.
In these few months while Stephen has been away, I've had a rest. I've slept, read, taken long walks in recovery. I've begun rigorous workouts at a gym. I am in training for my son's return.
As I've grown stronger, my fatigue and fear have given way to cautious engagement with the future. I understand now that no one has the answer to my son's troubles. My belief that answers come from others—from therapists, school counselors, or teachers, from the law—has paralyzed me. No one will rescue us. This is the way it is: Stephen's adolescence will feel like a lifetime, his fourteenth year like ten.
I drive east from Littleton, south from Salem, late in the day, snow on the ground in the lengthening light. Some days I allow myself a good loud blubbering cry, then take a deep breath, pull over, and fix my makeup.
Where do they come from, guns taken so easily into the hands of boys to be traded, lent, stolen, bought, and sold?
The boy Stephen loved toy guns. He collected an arsenal of toy machine guns, all olive-drab plastic, or camouflaged green, gray, and black. He wrapped the stocks with electrical tape. He, his cousins, and his friends wore army fatigues to look like the G.I. Joe figures they amassed, figures that come with tiny guns, knives, bayonets.
They played for hours, staging battles, building little forts in the dirt, creating front lines, and setting the tanks in staggered lines, contorting the soldiers in aggressive poses.
If they were lucky to have some fireworks—black cats or ladyfingers—they'd stand back from their combat zone and drop the fireworks into the bunkers.
Sometimes I was called out to witness the explosions.
“Mom! Come see! We're gonna drop the bombs now!”
I'd watch Stephen and his cousins touch the wicks of the ladyfingers with punks, as their fathers and uncles taught them, then flip them skillfully toward the battle scene. The little men went flying, the dust of the battles kicked up, the pieces of twigs, grass, stones scattering that were the bunkers, the boys by turns roaring with laughter and admiring the smoke, how authentic it appeared in miniature as it lingered over their destruction.
This was play and I recognized it as such. These were boys playing army like my brothers used to, brothers now educated, prosperous c
itizens with sons of their own— sons who, summers, visiting the grandparents, played passionate games of army with my sons.
By the time we moved to Brookline, I was aware of the culture's raised eyebrows regarding mothers who let their sons play with toy guns. The neighbors frowned as Stephen and his friends, in full fatigues and armed with plastic guns, moved down the sidewalk toward the park to stage life-size battles.
I held my ground. This was play And if the neighbors didn't approve, they could read in the Atlantic in the autumn of 1989 an article by Bruno Bettleheim that gave language to my instincts about toy gun play.
Bettleheim suggests that the phenomenon of young boys playing with toy guns is both harmless and necessary. They play with guns, he says, because they feel defensive.
A previous collection of essays in The Uses of Enchantment discusses how children are perpetually bombarded with feelings of powerlessness at the hands of the authority figures in their lives.
Against recent notions of eradicating violent fairy tales from children's libraries, it is better, says Bettleheim, to give them imaginary stand-ins with whom they can identify— for instance, the monsters and evil villains in the Greek myths or the Brothers Grimm.
Through their identification with the Cyclops, his brutal destruction of Odysseus’ crew, children can imaginatively act out their anger at adults, their feelings of paralysis and despair.
At the same time, they can witness Odysseus’ cunning as he plots the Cyclops’ demise, moves his men, in sheepskins, out of the cave to freedom. Children can be both Cyclops and Odysseus, the evil aggressor and the heroic citizen who acts on behalf of others, slays the oppressor, and saves his crew.
Such stories, insists Bettleheim, instill little morality plays inside a child's mind. Rigorous and aggressive toy gun play is a form of such dramas.
But what about real guns? Does my son believe that to handle and trade them, to point one at a girl and threaten her is play? By allowing, even encouraging his childhood war games, did I inadvertently set him up for this confusion?
“It wasn't a real gun,” he sneered the day he was expelled from the Park School for threatening the girl.
“But she thought it was,” I argued.
“Well, she's stupid then.”
Is it that Stephen wants, at all costs, to keep on playing, even though the world isn't playing anymore? Is he angry with the world for not playing? Is he using his own enduring belief in play to dupe and frighten? Perhaps he is angry with himself because he still wants to play and the world refuses. And why does the world refuse? Has it grown up and left Stephen?
I take exit 9 off the Mass Pike and drive the back roads toward Amherst. Some years ago I did a poetry reading there and I remember how lovely it was. I'm thinking about Bettleheim's ideas on what he calls an animistic or ego-centered imagination. Children, he argues, possess it. Everything to them is animated, alive.
Bettleheim insists that children cannot understand an abstract universe because such a universe is indifferent to them and this is too frightening to conceive. It enforces their fear that they are powerless.
Better to tell them, he says, that the world rests on the back of a benevolent tortoise than to try to explain the rotation of planets. Not until adolescence can they begin to grasp such abstract concepts.
Could it be, then, that Stephen has fallen into a well between a child's reality that everything is alive, and the encroaching adult view that it is not, or that some things are and some things are not? This is, and that isn't.
Is his anger partly a result, anger that has eroded his empathy and his ability to be loved?
Or has Stephen unwittingly replaced one game with another, replaced innocent play with dangerous play Indeed, why does anyone give up one game for another? Perhaps because the first game has grown tiresome. And why has it grown tiresome? It has become predictable—one always loses at it. Or, on the other hand, one always wins.
In either case, it is no fun anymore. There is no sense of disappointment or reward. In fact, there results a sense of irritation, even anger at having wasted one's time in the first place.
What would make it fun again? If one can't change the outcome of always losing, or always winning, what could be done to make the game challenging? Well, perhaps one might secretly change the rules.
I'm remembering now how once, flying to Denver, Stephen, Stan, and I played cards to pass the time. Not long into the game, we discovered that eight-year-old Stephen was cheating, hiding cards in his pockets or slipping them up his sleeves. We had offered to him that his cheating rendered the game no fun for Stan and me, to which, to our surprise, he had responded, “Guys, listen. There are no laws in the air …”
The prospect of playing Twenty-one bored Stephen. It was a game he usually lost at because it required him to practice arithmetic, the subject he most hated in school. So he had secretly changed the rules, changed them, at the expense of his opponents, to make the game fun for himself.
“You mean, ‘It's not whether you win or lose but where you play the game?” Stan laughed.
“Yep!” Stephen answered as he reshuffled the cards.
Route 9 winds north and west to Amherst, follows the trees, the stone fences, the small ponds frozen, holding the gray afternoon sky. How passionately Stephen played as a child. He used his whole joyful body as he became this or that character in a drama, as he dressed up as the young wizard Ged or, draped in blankets, crawled along the floor, tinfoil sword in hand, Odysseus leading his crew to safety.
And when did this play stop? It was the fall of 1988, the year Charles left for college. Stephen was just eleven. He and I rattled around in that huge apartment, the night and the cold crowding the many ceiling-high windows, everything there suddenly too big for us. Even to each other we seemed smaller, strained, self-conscious.
Our three lives had to that point so powerfully contained the others, and the loss of Charles—even in the face of our joy for his success, his new adventures— opened up bare rooms inside Stephen and me.
In an attempt to close the spaces, I'd rearranged the furniture in the apartment; into the corner of the kitchen moved a small table just big enough for two, laid out a bright tablecloth and a light left burning. Here Stephen and I ate together.
But the enormous rooms around us and the cold night outside bore through. Stephen would fall silent, speaking up only to ask if he could call Charles tonight. Of course. But Charles was often out.
So might so-and-so sleep over? But it was a weeknight, and though Stephen was certainly allowed to telephone, one, two, three friends in the area, the parents of the boys said no.
“How about if we curl up in my bed and I'll read to you?” I'd offer.
“I'm too old to be read to, Mom, remember?” was his reply.
“Awww,” I tried to cajole him, “just one good story for old times’ sake? You read to me now. You owe me fifty-two thousand and twenty-three stories. Read me ‘For the One Who Set Out to Study Fear.’ I love that one, don't you?”
“I don't feel like it, Mom. Sorry.”
Indeed, about a month or so before, in the middle of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Stephen had declared himself too old to be read to. But for years we had read to each other every night, sometimes for hours.
Though Stephen is exceptionally bright, perceptive, taught himself to read at three, he possessed then and now a short attention span. At that time doctors, therapists, teachers rarely isolated the problem as attention deficit disorder.
And Stephen was much like his namesake, my youngest brother, Stephen, who had also been a very active, delightful, but challenging little boy. Stephen's behaviors were not unfamiliar to me. He was, to be sure, insatiable about his interests. Physically gifted, he spent the good part of any day on his feet. The one, perhaps the only meditative quality young Stephen possessed was that he was a rapt listener to good stories.
Stories were a way, for instance, to get Stephen to settle down enough to tak
e a bath. Through the years we developed a repertoire of bathtub tales, most if not all focusing on the animals of my childhood.
Stephen's favorite concerned a little black dog named Vick. He loved to hear me tell how one day on a bike ride in the country, I heard puppies whining and barking somewhere nearby. Behind a farmhouse I found a mesh kennel full of small black dogs. When the owner came out of the barn and offered to sell me a pup, I was sorry to tell him, “I don't have any money. But I'd take good care of one…
“You's a little Sugabaka, ain'cha? Live over to the apple orchard? Behind Main?” Stephen laughed at my overwrought affectation of a deep southern Missouri accent.
“Yes, sir,” I answered.
“We-e-11, telly what I'd do. I'd trade one o’ them pups for a bushel of apples from your daddy's trees.”
The tub stories were short, the length of the bath. Afterward, we'd settle in to read. And I began to see that by reading to him, Stephen's attention could be engaged for longer and longer periods of time. I hoped that eventually this experience would translate into other areas in which he might comfortably sit still.
Stephen leaned close to me, his head just below mine so that I could smell his hair, his sweet child's breath as now and then he asked a question or asked to be reread certain passages. As he became more proficient at reading, we would trade off, he reading one page, I another.
So we devoured fairy tales, myths, narrative poems, ghost stories, science fiction, and, as he grew older, novels. During art period and after school he liked to draw the characters we'd read about. Stephen pinned up his drawings until nearly every wall of his room was covered in pictures of Ged and the flying dragons from The Wizard of Earthsea, Long John Silver, Frog and Toad, Odysseus disguised as a sheep, the Hunchback of Notre Dame, the Cyclops, Cerberus, the Phantom of the Opera.
But the night Stephen decided no more stories, no more Huck Finn, he took down the drawings. He did so ritualistically carefully removing the tacks and putting them in a box, piling the drawings, facedown, under his bed.
The Stardust Lounge Page 4
