The Boy Detective

by Roger Rosenblatt

  SPEAKING OF MEMORY—were we speaking of memory?—you may be wondering if I invented the Norwegians. Me, too. I refer to that summer when I was six in Weston, Connecticut. On one of my bike excursions one morning, I came upon a family from Norway, sitting on a lawn. A mother with a smiling face. A father with jet-black hair and a jaw like a plow. A son, a few years older than I, named Arvid. All three were very nice to me. The parents were about to send a birthday card to their daughter back in Norway. “How do you say ‘happy birthday’ in your language?” I asked them. “Yertlig Helslinger,” they said, and they proceeded to compose their note, which read, “Yertlig Helslinger, de mama, papa, uck Arvid.”

  For some sixty years, I held that phrase in my head—“Yertlig Helslinger”—hoping that someone would ask me how to say “happy birthday” in Norwegian or, even better, that I might meet a Norwegian on his or her birthday. It’s just as well that neither occasion presented itself, because recently, having learned at last to Google, I decided to confirm my memory of the phrase. In case you’re interested, pal, it turns out that “happy birthday” in Norwegian is “Gratulerer med dagen.” From this, one may reasonably conclude that I invented the Norwegians. Who knows? In any case, I wish you and yours a very Yertlig Helslinger.

  I FEEL MORE assured offering you two rules from what is called the Golden Age of detective fiction (1920–1939). The first is that the private eye cannot know anything the reader does not know. He cannot cheat or manipulate the reader by coming up with an ending that depends on information we did not have all along. Even in the inverted-plot stories where we are shown the criminal and the crime at the outset, as in Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock or in the Columbo TV series, where we watch the detective piece everything together so that he arrives at the place known to us from the start—even then, the detective cannot learn what we have not already learned. It must be proven that we were able to anticipate the ending, even if we were unaware that we could do it. The second rule (sorry) is that the detective cannot commit the crime. Keep that in mind as we move along.

  THUMBS-UP FOR THAT one there, who inspects his reflection in the window of Glatt’s Kosher on Thirteenth Street off First. Yes, that one. If his presentation goes well this morning, I mean really well, with no glitches like last week, when he dropped the box of pencils, and made forced jokes about dropping the ball; if he didn’t drop the ball this time, and everyone, and I mean everyone, including Charles himself, gave him the thumbs-up; if he wasn’t all thumbs this time, and the account, THE ACCOUNT, was his; and then he could run to his cubicle and tweet Sarah, who looked so much like Naomi Watts you would swear she was Naomi Watts, but who has been looking elsewhere lately, maybe more bored than elsewhere, but in any case, clearly (inasmuch as anything between two people can be clear) wants to drop him like a box of pencils and go back to her bar-hopping days, when she would allow herself to be picked up by the nearest douche bag in a grin, suit, and tie; if he could tell her about THE ACCOUNT and the thumbs, so that she could see that he would amount to something, after all—which his mother, Grace, always said about him, even if his dad, Warren, said he didn’t have a Chinaman’s chance, which coincidentally was what his Chinese professor at Bucknell (Was that the best school you could get into? Sarah had asked on their second date at Olive Garden), had told him, at least as far as learning Chinese was concerned, though the Bucknell Chinese professor did not say he didn’t have the chance of a Caucasian, ha-ha—I mean, if that is the issue, and not the fact that at age thirty-two, he cannot get it up for more than two minutes at a time, which condition makes him so nervous that he wonders about the difference between Cialis and Viagra, and droops like a wet pennant long before climbing into bed with Sarah, who by this time could not care less, and in fact he is getting it up right now as he inspects his reflection in the window of Glatt’s Kosher, experiencing the first real hard-on he’s had in months, brought on by the anticipation of a successful presentation this morning, not to mention THE ACCOUNT, after which Charles will give him the thumbs-up; and see? He’s got it up at last, everything up—well then, if that all happens, well then, everything, and I mean everything is going to be, in PI lingo, jake.

  IN CONTRAST, PLEASE turn your attention to cool dude who sits at the wheel of his Escalade, texting. He is stopped at a light now. But he will be texting later as well, on the FDR Drive, where he is heading at Twentieth Street and the river, during which texting he will die, taking a few others with him. His text will begin, BTW, WHERE R U? OMG . . .” and proceed no further. For the moment, though, he is safe at the light. Approaching that corner on foot is a young man of business, in a light gray suit and no topcoat. Another cool dude. His stride is cool. As is that of the girls in the red satin jackets of their high school volleyball team. The jackets are cool as well. The cop directing traffic also looks cool in his dark blue uniform, hard as a frozen roast. He notices me. I would try to look cool myself, but I am not cool.

  I think too weirdly to be cool. To wit: What if I were to toss a stone into the middle of this pond? Would the ripples touch the cop and the volleyball team, and then, widening, would they touch the young man of business? And finally, would the ripples reach the man texting in his Escalade? Before, I mean. Before he steps on the gas, and dies, taking a few others with him.

  LET ME TAKE that back, what I said earlier about dreams, or partly back. Wordsworth wrote, “Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting.” Hard to tell what the poet wishes us—to awaken into a dream state and call it life? Sha-boom? Well, I’ll give him this: life does feel like a dream much of the time. But that’s a long way from actually being one. And the safe distance from events that you can manufacture, or will, in a dream, that doesn’t happen when you’re awake. Life does not create protections from itself. There is a reality, you know. And, pace, Bill Wordsworth, it does not exist in the before-life. How hopeful they were, those Romantic boys. Coleridge snatching a baby out of its pram, to the horror of the child’s mother, and beseeching it to “Tell me about heaven!” Still, the idea has legs—“heaven lies about us in our infancy.” Sha-boom.

  What it depends on is our intuition of an immortal existence, Frankenstein minus the panic—a remembrance of things past, which things are only pure and joyful. If nothing else, such intimations suggest that we are better creatures than we appear, nobler than the ones who act in our name. I do love these poets. Yet, I cannot help but wonder what terrible sadness drove them to see the life about them as not really happening. With sadness as the impetus, the yearning for dreams makes sense. Then, immortal intimations may be seen not as philosophy, but rather as a consolation for living in a world that is sometimes harsh and often pitiless. You are standing beside the one you love, on a gray glacier, in the airless center of the moon, just after reality has clobbered you. Sha-boom. What would you say? Life is but a dream, sweetheart?

  BEFORE THE DREAM turned into a state of enlightenment, I shone my industrial-strength flashlight into the last dark closet on the right, and was inclined to remain. But, as it always does, the waking world insisted on itself, and I sat up in bed. Call that reality? Nero was reality. He had a statue of himself erected in one of his several palaces. One hundred and fifty feet high. When it was done, he gazed upon it and said, “At last I am beginning to live like a human being.”

  CAUGHT IN THE tangled yarn of the wind, the rich old dear plows on like the Russian army. I track his every step. He is loveless, without love. He holds himself to blame, yet wonders how it is that his life has come to this. Will love ever watch over him again? For no reason he can come up with, he thinks the lyrics of “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad,” following the entire song through its wandering narrative. Near the end, his partner Max, though a skeptic in all things, took up spiritualism and astrology, and announced that he’d be back. It has been sixteen years without a signal. Without a word. Just like Max. Are the servants in tonight? he asks himself, as he approaches his gingerbread apartment house on Thirty-third and Park. He
surveys the landscape of his building and sees a light in a window like unpolished silverware. Someone’s in the kitchen with Dinah.

  SOME FULL OF VINEGAR. Some full of sorrow. Some quick to anger. Some slow to burn. Some apologize. Some never apologize and walk with a stutter step. Some speak Spanish. Some do not. Some forget to mail a love letter that took three weeks to compose, and, to date, has taken three weeks to mail. Some are precancerous. Some are postmodern. Some consider the many. Some consider only themselves and are, nonetheless, quite charming, and make a good first impression. Some recall Achilles, and some never heard of Achilles, who, for his part, never heard of them.

  Sail on, my fellow voyagers. Sail under a clear sky, in the rolling forest of the night. Sail, and be safe. And, to be sure, I take note of your tentative movements. But see, even the snow hesitates tonight. We all sail with the same fear in the wind. From a great quiet you came, and toward a great quiet you proceed. Look there, in the black sky, on the port side of the horizon, a bright badge spewed with spices. Lo! Hark! The singing and chatter of life! And remember what Thetis told Achilles, that he had not long to live. And when the frightened Achilles reported to Patroclus what she had said, Patroclus told him: Pay no attention to her. She’s a god. She tells that to everyone.

  Long live the red dust on the stoops. Long live the ankle-length garment of the false prophet who skitters across the ramp at Fortieth and Park. Long live the weeds that insist upon voicing their opinions from the crevices of the chipped asphalt. Long live the obscenity. Long live the walk.

  YOU CAN’T GO for a successful walk in an agitated or fretful state of mind. Try it, and your pace will quicken to a near trot, or slow to a near crawl, a snail’s pace. The true walk requires a mind finely balanced between confidence and excitement. And if you are not of such a mind when you start out, the walk itself sometimes will create it in you. But you must be open to change. Like detective work, good walking is for liberals. Your correct state of mind is neither passionate nor dispassionate. It is a smile without the mouth turned up. It takes in and gives out as well, being at once idle and hard at work. Such a balanced stance suits the flaneur, the literary wanderer who creates the sights he takes in. Wordsworth was a flaneur of the countryside, as De Quincey was a flaneur of the city. Whitman was known as a “boulevardier,” an elegant stroller. Frank O’Hara made mental maps as he walked in New York. His world grew lovelier, ecstatic.

  I wonder what my personal cartographer would make of my territory. Haphazard map, lurching its way through the crazy syntax of side streets and three random parks, then up the avenues that changed their names, and east to the river with a million currents, and west to the middle of Manhattan, if you please. Cut out all the surrounding acreage, and what have we? Hic sunt dracones. My compass spins out of whack. My legend unreadable, my navigations berserk. In the deepest frost, snow falling like ashes, my cartographer goes about with pencil and sextant. Is this the New World? I ask him. Always has been, he says.

  Winter. Winter. A cerement in the word. Two homeless men and one homeless woman pile themselves together on the steps of the Marble Collegiate Church at Twenty-ninth and Fifth. The men have hair like thatched roofs. The woman is a cartridge shell. They stare at me like rifles. Their canteens are empty, their gear spread wide like flattery. I want to ask them how the battle went, much less the war. The woman mutters, “Gawd.” Where is Matthew Brady when you need him?

  WHERE’S JOHNNY MORRIS when you need him, I’d like to know, when America has no natural heroes left and every so-called national leader looks twice before he fails to leap. Not Johnny Morris. He who organized evening tackle football games in the park (I used Peter’s diapers as shoulder pads). He who printed programs for the games, and positioned flashlights in the trees to illuminate the gravel field, and saw to it that all the neighborhood parents were invited. He who protected the little guy, especially his younger brother, Mark. He included everyone. He who established snow forts and capture-the-flag games and ring-a-levio, and who said one fine spring day, “You be the pitcher.” So I became a pitcher. He who got a Nok Hockey game for Christmas, and when I told my dad that I wanted one, too, Johnny said, “You don’t need a game of your own. If I have one, we all have one.” He who papered the wall of his room at number 34 with full-page photos of pro athletes, ripped out of Sport magazine. And when he did that, so did I. When his dad suddenly switched jobs, the Morrises moved up to Westchester and the air went out of Gramercy Park, and the light and the shout. Whenever Johnny carried the football tucked to his chest, he half-sang, half-muttered “They Always Call Me Mr. Touchdown” under his breath, as an accompaniment to his game. He used to say I was the smart one.

  IN PENNSYLVANIA, on an overnight at summer camp, a bunch of us boys strayed from the group and went for an evening walk, on which we came upon a deserted farmhouse. One lame-brained kid, who used to amuse himself by pulling the legs off frogs, casually tossed a rock at an upstairs window. He missed. Another boy came closer, his rock hitting just below the sill with a slap. Then all the boys picked up rocks and hurled them at the empty gray farmhouse. Its paint was peeling. It stood like a headstone against the slate of the sky. A few minutes passed. I watched the others throw their rocks, and considered whether or not I wanted to join in. Then, acting on a reflex more than a thought, I picked up an especially good rock and threw it at that upstairs window. I was a pitcher. I did not miss.

  Drink in the fresh-mowed grass. Grind the dirt under your cleats. Stare in. Turn away. Do we ever leave our childhood? “Roger is a good athlete” read my second-grade report card. “But he doesn’t like to play with other children.” More problem than compliment in that, since most of the sports one plays require the cooperation of other children. Consider the person who can play with his peers but chooses not to, and so is left in a self-confounding position—he who stands alone among other players, elevated, the center of attention who is at the same time ignored by his teammates, expendable and indispensable, at once in and out of the game.

  The thing about pitching, about being a pitcher, is that you want to make the batter appreciate what you have thrown at him, but only after the ball has settled in the catcher’s mitt. The batter looks at the ball, and then at you. You look at him, but only briefly, a glance. You don’t want to taunt him. You let the ball do that. And then he looks away, as in a dream, having coming to terms with the fact that the only way to understand what you have done is when it is too late for him to do anything about it. Like detective work. Like writing.

  MY FATHER, game to play catcher, crouches for me in the driveway of an inn we are staying at in Southampton. I pitch to him, too fast, maybe. Unthinkingly, maybe. A rare flicker of fear in his eyes as he reaches for the ball—the flicker I saw years later, after his first heart attack. Then it was submerged. Now it lies on the surface, and is laced with his being impressed with me—rarer still—impressed that I can throw as fast as that. In fact, my fastball seemed fast only to him. In my first varsity game in high school, my first pitch, a fastball, hit the batter in the shoulder. I stepped off the mound to see if he was okay. He stood at the plate, chuckling.

  A game of catch between father and son. A game of catch between me and our children. Not quite the same as pitcher-catcher, which is more purposeful, more aggressive, but generally the same idea. The ball flies between the generations, between the hearts and minds. It’s not called “throw,” that game, because the idea is that you’ll catch each other, that father and children will understand each other in the silent way we do. My father and I understand each other, in the driveway.

  Richard Wilbur visited a modern poetry class I was teaching at Harvard in the 1960s. He listened to my students interpret several of his poems, then said, to their delight: “It’s nice to meet people who catch what you’re throwing.” Especially a curve.

  WRITING IS unreasonably demanding. A tyrant, a regular Stalin, when you get down to it. Why do I have to produce an ocean in the morning, much less pa
int the sun-streaks on it, much less the plaster clouds or the goddam sun itself? What do you take me for, anyway—a court magician, a wizard in a stupid star-splashed dunce’s hat? A down-and-out sketch artist on lower Fifth on a Sunday afternoon, awaiting your ten bucks so that I might make your chin more manly or give you a nose job in charcoal? I’m not God, for Chrissake, or Christ, for God’s sake. I’m not your father, either, if that’s what you’re thinking, and even if I were your father, aren’t you old enough by now to fetch your own ocean? Oh, never mind. I’m just venting. You didn’t create this case. I did. I, and the smirking sheet of paper that says, in the greasy voice of a racetrack tout, how about an ocean this morning, pal? Yeah. And make it original.

  NATURALLY, YOU DON’T get there all at once, or on your own. It took two seasoned private eyes to show me the ropes. The first was Rowse B. Wilcox, whom I had only for ninth grade English, but that was enough to begin forging the connection between literature and detective work. He was too drunk too often, so the school canned him. To be sure, he had been indispensible to hundreds of students for decades, but he was dying anyway. Why not send him into exile? So Mr. Wilcox took up his final residence here where I am now, at the Prince George Hotel on Twenty-eighth Street between Madison and Fifth, built in 1904 and restored to much of its former grandeur after decades as a flophouse. Our first real teacher, he taught us that a verb could contain the force of a noun, as in “the leaf pinwheeled to the ground.” He taught us the difference between drama and melodrama. “Drama is opposed activity with conflict. Melodrama is opposed activity without conflict.” Bony, like Lincoln, he sat up in front of the room at the chipped wooden desk, legs crossed like chopsticks. He had a lusty reputation with the girls. I do not remember his voice.