The Boy Detective

by Roger Rosenblatt

  But I tell you, poking around that apartment, which is what detectives and police do all the time, was chilling. It was entering someone else’s life and all of the accoutrements peculiar to that life. And while it is exhilarating to do the very same thing as a writer of fiction, when you have created a person and the apartment out of the materials of your mind, to snoop around in reality makes you feel like the lowest sort of intruder. You are where you are not supposed to be, not invited or welcome. And whether or not the worst that you feared comes to pass, you feel ashamed, as though you had committed a crime yourself. That evening I told the woman what had happened, and what I’d done. She thanked me and shrugged it off. Whenever I spoke with her after that day, however, I made it brief.

  WHY IS MEMORY more self-punishing than approving? A woman I ran into some years ago, the sister of a boy from the neighborhood, told me she had never forgotten a day when the kids were choosing up sides for a softball game. No one would take her because she was a girl, she said, and I had welcomed her to my team. And recently, a man who wanted me to join him in some money venture (I didn’t) tried to persuade me by recalling my reckless bravery as a boy on an occasion when I fought a Third Avenue thug who was pushing us around and pinned him to the sidewalk. I had no recollection of either incident.

  What I do remember is a feeling of remorse every time I found myself in a fistfight—win, lose, or draw—and many more instances of cowardice than bravery. If someone else’s memory paints me as generous and courageous, and my own memory thinks much less of me, it might mean that I am better than my self-assessment for the very severity of my self-criticism. Then again, if I am right and they are not, I could be even worse than I imagine for deliberately forgetting a slew of sins. In any event, the competition is not among truths. It is among memories—some woman’s, some man’s, versus mine. Does all this mean that the “who am I” question is up for grabs? I prefer to think that who we are depends not on scraps of information tossed up by a perception of the past, but rather on present actions, which wards off memory in the interests of simply doing. See? If no one believed in time, this wouldn’t even be a problem. You are what you are now, the eternal now, unencumbered by high or low expectations informed by memory, which is untrustworthy anyway.

  Now, this comes back: a kid in summer camp, sort of a henchman to the bunk bully, who had persuaded himself that he was as tough and strong as the bully he served. One night he decided to try out his imagined prowess on me. He jumped on my back and started to punch me in the neck. I got him in a headlock. “Give!” I told him. He did not surrender. His face reddened. “Give!” I repeated. Harder, tighter, relishing my shameful victory. He gave.

  HERE’S A MEMORY so faint it arises as a palimpsest, present and absent. It involves a Halloween party. But that is the only fact it involves. The event itself—was it Halloween?—is associated with the scent of creosote. And the people—was I there?—were dour and disapproving. Something to do with a mask of the Frankenstein monster, I think. Or of President Eisenhower. Ike. Ice. Maybe it wasn’t a party. All that is left is a feeling of being out of place. But that could be anywhere.

  Oh, pay no attention to me. I was just another lost boy, a lot luckier than most. Better that I pay you a visit, inquire as to your health, read something to you, if you like, until you fall asleep. I could read to you during your sleep. Several years ago, I read to a girl in a coma. The fifteen-year-old daughter of a friend had been hit by a car and medivaced to the ICU. She lay in her white bed like a princess under a spell. I read her Crime and Punishment (I have no idea why) and wondered when she awoke, if she would call for Dostoyevsky or demand never to hear his name again. Neither occurred. When she did awaken at last, we all were too grateful to worry about her education in Russian literature. Not that I ever finished Crime and Punishment myself. Every time I try, I get only as far as the Crime.

  As for loneliness, I exaggerate it. My troubles were my own, but no different in size or depth from that of any kid. Everyone bears a burden. And mine were pretty lightweight. In the mid 1970s, I wrote a weekly column for the Washington Post. Standing at the urinal one day beside Howard Simons, the Post’s managing editor, I said, “Howard, why does one pronounce the n in columnist, but not in the word column? Shouldn’t columnist be pronounced without the n? Columist?” Without looking up, he said, “Roger, I wish I had your problems.”

  BUT YOU, PAL. How are you feeling these days? The docs assured you that you’d be on your feet in no time. And here you are, on your feet, yet worried to death about the matter of no time. Should we speak of every topic but radiation? Or should we speculate about how much radiation you have absorbed, comparing you to the citizens of Hiroshima, and calculating that you may have been given the bigger dose? We could share a good laugh over that. You know? You touch my heart. Do you realize that?

  Here, then, I pause, and imagine you, in your sorrowful beauty and your low, lovely voice. What are you doing out there among the shady characters? Will you speak in my dreams and walk down the street ahead of me, knowing I am behind you, yet never turning to face me? Athens comes to mind, and I see Mount Lycabettus at Easter and you in the silent spiral of pilgrims’ candles in the night. What is your role on this random walk? I sit at a small round table covered with a checkered cloth, in the back of the café, in my trench coat, with my fedora angled over my eyes, pulling on a Marlboro and watching you admiringly. You have endured so much. Are you there?

  A WORD IN favor of policemen? No one will admit it, but without the presence of the get-everything-wrong cops, detectives could not get anything right. Not only is it the policeman who first deals with the corpse (position of, nature of wound, autopsy, etc.), but it is also he who gives us everyone who did not do it, thus, in effect, becoming the ass-backward advocate of Holmes’s explanation to Watson in The Sign of Four, that “when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”

  Yet outside these purely functional attributes is the policeman himself, his official drudgery, his glamourless heroism. At one point in The Maltese Falcon, the head cop berates an underling for not being thorough enough—“So, ya seen your duty and ya done it.” But that’s just it about cops. They see their duty and they do it. And, while the best moments of any mystery, including the solution, are given to the outsider detective, it is the civil servant cop who keeps the laws in place and maintains civilization, such as it is, not for a single flashy case, but every day, day after day. Who would want a world made up solely of Philo Vances? I wonder what it would be like to end a mystery story, not with a wisecrack or a self-satisfied remark of the great detective, but instead with a shot of the cop hauling away the killer the detective discovered, and cuffing him, and printing him, and locking him up. Or better, a shot of him going home well after the story is finished, and Holmes or Wolfe has already raised a glass to his own genius, and we see the dog-tired policeman lay his gun and badge on top of his dresser and strip down to his civvies, and turn on Dancing with the Stars.

  INTERESTING, THAT SO many detectives speak peculiarly. Vance’s fancy patter was barely intelligible. Poirot said, “Never will my English be quite perfect,” and he was always tossing in French phrases to make his point. Holmes’s English was frequently snotty, archly witty. Sam Spade spit out English through his teeth. Charlie Chan hardly spoke it at all, resorting to the wisdom of Confucius and other aphorisms, and speaking a pidgin English that had no use for a, an, or the. In Murder by Death (1976), which burlesqued all the famous detectives, a talking moose head on a wall was so exasperated with Chan’s English, he yelled out, “Use the article!”

  On the other hand, you tend to pay attention to these oddly speaking characters, more than you might if they talked like everyone else. It’s like writing, again. What you want to do as a writer, above all, is to find your original language, which, like the detective, allows you your own way to get at the truth. A real writer’s language sounds like no one else’s.
It is as if he sees the world so strangely that he must find an equally strange way to express himself.

  BUT WHAT IS one to make of the Jacobsons? Of Chick Jacobson, né Solomon Jacobson, and his sisters, Ruth and Edie, and his little brother, Dick? I ask only because the Jacobson family was an anomaly in the neighborhood, where almost everyone else was upper-middle-class WASP, or wannabees, or wanna-appears, like my dad. The Jacobsons were evidently, openly, aggressively, very very Jewish. They looked Jewish. They sounded Jewish. They celebrated Jewish holidays, including Purim. They let other people who were Jewish and didn’t know it, know it. I am speaking of me and Chick in the park one afternoon, when he informed me emphatically that I was Jewish. I was six, maybe seven, and had no idea what he was talking about. “Oh yeah,” he said. “You’re Jewish.” When I went home, I asked my mom, who made a sweet, affirming smile.

  So naturally, my dad would have nothing to do with the Jacobsons. Neither with the kids, who were sharp and giving and full of life, nor with the mother, a small, kind, pale, silver-haired woman with a tired face, nor with the father, a gentle, burly guy who owned an antiques shop specializing in monstrosities—outlandish chandeliers and huge carved wooden chairs made for Norse gods. So naturally, I hung out with the Jacobsons. Whole weekends were spent in their apartment at 60 Gramercy, which was crowded with the junk from Mr. Jacobson’s shop. Loud and loving. Such a strange family.

  Unlike myself or the other kids I played with who lived around the park, Chick went to the local public school and, afterward, to Stuyvesant High School, which at the time was located on the east side of Stuyvesant Park. By then he and I had diverged, as kids do, though for a few years, Chick was my constant friend. I ate dinners at his house two or three times a week. Sloppy dishes of noodles and pummeled meat, consumed noisily while the family quarreled one moment and made extravagant plans the next. Chick didn’t know how to pronounce yacht. He referred to a “yackt.” He didn’t care. He had confidence in himself. All the Jacobsons had confidence in themselves and in one another, which made one happy to be in their presence. They feared nothing, those Jacobsons.

  SPEAKING OF JEWS—and who does not?—since my father had refused a bar mitzvah when he was a boy, I insisted on having one. My determination was born of nothing more spiritual than a wish to give him an in-your-face gesture of rebellion—a gesture made more pointless by my father’s reaction to it, which was simply to accede. He did not even blink when the synagogue I chose was the Spanish and Portuguese, probably because I remembered the cemetery on Eleventh Street. I had no idea that the temple, which occupied a monumental gray building on Seventieth Street and Central Park West, was one of the oldest Orthodox synagogues in the country. Thus, merely to stick it to my old man, I undertook instruction in the strictest and most demanding branch of Judaism, creating a series of hurdles for myself, such as trying to learn to read Hebrew in less than a year.

  In fact, I couldn’t do it, so I decided to memorize the part of the Torah I was assigned to present. In the dark afternoons after school, I rode the bus to the synagogue, muttering my Hebrew recitation like an old man in prayer. On my bar mitzvah morning, I stood on an elegant wooden platform at the center of the temple, beside the white-bearded David de Sola Pool and four other solemn rabbis in black, as I pretended to read the Hebrew before me. At one point, I pronounced an important word inaccurately, and the rabbis shook with stifled laughter. No one ever told me what terrible mistake I had made, but it must have been a beaut.

  When the ceremony was over, I stood outside with my family and their friends, and with my own friends, including Chick. I received warm wishes and congratulations and kisses, as I nodded and chatted and felt like the fraud I was. Except for weddings and bar mitzvahs and bat mizvahs of the children of our friends today, that morning at the Spanish and Portuguese was the last time I ever set foot in a synagogue. What is worse, I knew it would be when the inspiration of a bar mitzvah had first occurred to me. I gained nothing by it. My father . . . I see him standing before the three stone columns of the synagogue, wearing his derby hat and black winter coat with the Chesterfield collar. My father smiled knowingly. That night, I buried myself in the couch, wolfed down a BLT, and watched Claude Rains in The Invisible Man on TV.

  HOW I WISH I felt the affection for my neighborhood that Alfred Kazin felt for his, in Brooklyn, in A Walker in the City. Much of Kazin’s love of place came from streets like Pitkin Avenue in Brownsville, teeming with people and surprises. More was due to the Jewishness of the area. Though he described his intimacy with his synagogue as “loveless,” still it gave him a feeling of belonging, of occupying a niche in a tradition. Not long ago, I asked Leon Wieseltier about the core of his own passion for Judaism. He said his love for it is profound, because it allows him to explore spiritual and metaphysical questions, issues of meaning. So his Judaism is not solely collective, it is idiosyncratically individuated. His joy derives from the poetry and the philosophy as much as from the people. Judaism is both his religion and civilization, he told me. I am happy for him, but such a passion never could have been mine. My father saw to that. So did Gramercy Park, which for all its insistent bourgeoisie dignity remained joyless even at Christmas, when the tree blazed in the park with its familiar set of lights and the accordionist from Calvary Church led residents in the routinized singing of carols.

  I was literary editor of the New Republic in the mid 1970s, and in that time I had dealings with Alfred Kazin, which was akin to waltzing with a learned Jewish polar bear: equally impressive, cute, and dangerous. Alfred wrote several book reviews for the magazine, all perfect. Then one morning, he phoned to ask if he could review Lillian Hellman’s latest autobiography. Being in my early thirties, and having not a clue as to any of the internecine wars waged by the older literary set—and not a whiff of suspicion that Kazin hated Hellman as he alone could hate—I said sure. The review arrived still smoking. It was a raging personal attack from the first sentence on, rarely stooping to discuss the contents of the book. I told Alfred I couldn’t run it. He told me I was depriving him of his rights of free expression. I told him, bullshit.

  During the following months, whenever I ran into anyone in journalism or publishing, that person would report, “You know, Alfred Kazin says you deprived him of his rights of free expression.” Then Alfred called again, and said he was coming to Washington, where our family lived at the time and where the New Republic was located. Would I have lunch with him? We had not been seated ten seconds when he said, “You deprived me of my rights of free expression.” This time I said, “Alfred. I probably have a longer life ahead of me than you do. Tell me. Are you ever going to get over this?” He laughed good-naturedly, giving every indication that the matter was closed. Later in the week, I got a call from an editor at the New York Times Sunday Arts section. “Alfred Kazin says you deprived him of his rights of free expression. Do you have any comment?”

  Like many crazy writers, Kazin was a lot easier to read than to live with. In his prose, I still hear his high-pitched smoky voice relating his walk in the city, glorying in a Brooklyn summer day and in the “indescribable joy” he felt being himself in his neighborhood, which wrapped around him like a mother’s arms. That I did envy.

  THE SNOW WAS blinding, but I had to get there. You understand. I had lost the formula. So I plowed into the blizzard wearing bandages covering my body and my face, my whole head, and the obvious garish wig and my outer-space sunglasses. At the inn I demanded a room and pored over my notes from the lab, muttering, “There must be a way back.” But then the bobbies burst in and offered me sushi. O tempura. O mores. In daylight you cannot see me, but in a blizzard I appear a bubble. “There must be a way back.” Stop me before I sleep again, because as I’ve said before, an invisible man can rule the world. And vice versa. Definitely vice versa.

  EVERY SO OFTEN one reads of a man or a woman who takes a walk across the country, or the continent, or even someone who walks around the world, over the Poles. Feats
of endurance and stamina, to be sure, but not real walks, as I understand them. The man who walks around the world must be conscious, all the time, of just how far he has traveled, and of how far he has to go. He measures his heartbeats, monitors his pulse. Such thoughts do not occur to the wanderer, the one who has no interest in setting world records or in drawing attention to himself. He occasionally may be aware of how tired he has grown, but he is no more self-conscious than that. He looks away from himself. He wonders.

  He is like Freddie, Margie’s boyfriend on the TV show My Little Margie. Margie’s father had no use for Freddie, because Freddie didn’t have a job. He spent his days watching people work at construction sites, and he was completely happy.

  Praise to those who walk around the world. Praise to those who measure their meters and miles. But the highest praise to that fellow here on Sixteenth and Union Square East, in the green parka and the yellow boots, who wanders past, looking at me looking at him. And, it goes without saying, praise to Freddie.

  BUT WHAT’S WRONG with him, who seems intentionally to have driven his shoulder into mine on his path straight to hell? I don’t want to know. I don’t want to hear about his overbearing boss, or his idiot brother-in-law, or his ungrateful children or his lover who has unrequited him for the umpteenth time this week. I want nothing to do with him and his furious life, or to listen to him as he collars me and shouts, “What do you know of suffering or want or the dry hunger I have felt for her all this time—she who feels fire only for other men? I could kill her. I could kill you.” And if I were foolish enough to give him the time of day, I would then ask, “Why me?” And he would say, “Because you deserve to die.” Yeah yeah.