The Boy Detective

by Roger Rosenblatt

  Everyone misses something. The trouble with us impressionists is that we don’t know we’re impressionists. We think we’re realists.

  That’s messed up.

  “Journey of life like feather in stream. Must continue with current.”

  Bashō?

  Charlie Chan. In Egypt. Can I go now?

  One more question. Why did you become a detective?

  To punish the guilty and rescue the innocent.

  And did you accomplish these things?

  Sure. Of course I did. You bet.

  IF YOU LIVE like an impressionist, there’s no carrying things too far. When I wasn’t occupied with a case as a kid, I spent a good deal of time in Miller’s and Kauffman’s, examining bridles, bits, crops, and saddles for my horse. The fact that I did not have a horse never affected my enthusiasm for window-shopping for equipment for which I had no use and I couldn’t afford anyway. Looking back, I’m not sure what I was doing in the saddlery shops, but I must have had the impression that I owned a horse or soon would own one. If ever a salesperson in Miller’s or Kauffman’s approached to ask if I needed help, I said no thanks.

  IMAGINE WHAT YOU know. Shelley said something close to that in his Defense of Poetry, and I have appropriated the idea in my memoir course. In the early classes, I talked about the difference between invention and the imagination—the difference between, say, inventing a horse that merely talks, like Mr. Ed, and creating a horse that has something to say, like Swift’s Houyhnhnms that bear the burdens of civilization. The imagination has different levels. You can imagine something that has never been seen before. And you can imagine something that has always been seen, yet never in the way you see it. For that you need to dream into the object of your attention, to see the inherent nobility in the animal that has borne so much without complaint and to make that animal ruler of the universe. Imagine what you know, I tell my students, and what you know will become wonderfully strange, and it will be all yours. More truly and more strange.

  To push this idea along, I give them short exercises for their dreaming. The first day of class, I brought in a pair of old sneakers, running shoes, tossed them in the middle of the seminar table, and asked the students to imagine the ordinary sneakers before them. One young woman produced a piece about a man in the apartment across from her, who left one sneaker in the hallway outside his door every morning, because he had but one leg, and he needed that one sneaker, and then he put two sneakers out at night, as if to indicate that the other leg existed. In another exercise, I asked them to listen to a piece of music and to write a piece on what the music inspired. Poetry, fiction, memoir, anything. I did the same for a painting. And for a flower: Dream into a tulip. I asked them to write a piece from the point of view of a part of the body, and another from the point of view of a punctuation mark. You’re a semicolon, a hyphen. I asked them to write a piece from the point of view of a machine, to dream into the machine. The students became a bathroom scale, two clocks, an iPad, several cars, a guillotine, a vibrator, and a tattoo needle that spoke in rapid stutters. More dreams. I eat their dreams like candy.

  LAST NIGHT I dreamed I was in my grandparents’ tenement apartment at the corner of Ninth Street and Second Avenue, where I am standing now. Only in my dream the apartment did not consist of three smallish rooms, with a view of the sooty shaft that dropped to a dark pit three stories below. This dreamed-of apartment was a network, more like a maze, of some twenty rooms and five or six bathrooms. And I was trying to shave and get dressed so that I could join my friends, many of them, who were also in the apartment. We all were about to travel somewhere, and there was much hurrying-up and preparatory activity before we got under way. But I could not find my two suitcases, and I could not find my clothes. And by the time I did, and shaved, and prepared to join the others, most of the people were already out the door. “Patta,” I said when I ran into my grandfather at the dream’s end. “I did not remember that your place was so big.” “Oh yes,” he said. “It has always been very big.”

  How long before I return to the monuments of my former yearning and feel nothing? Now, on Twelfth Street and Second Avenue, I pass the Village East Cinema, which was the Stuyvesant Movie Theater when I was a kid. Past where the Jade Mountain Chinese restaurant stood until a few years ago, where my family got takeout nearly every Sunday. I tired of the routine. Peter tells me that one Sunday I finally balked and told my parents, “I don’t want to go to the Jade Mountain or any other mountain.”

  Tonight I inspect the doorway to my grandparents’ tenement at 148 Second Avenue in the gentrified neighborhood. The building looks the same—same wooden doorframe, same floral tiles on the floor. No matter how poor the residents all those years ago, there always were architectural gestures toward beauty. One thing is different. Where the names listed in the hall register inside the front door were SPRUCH, FINEBERG, COHEN, and GALLUZZI, now they are BEARDSLEY, DAVIS, SHELLEY, and RIGBY.

  One block farther south on St. Marks Place itself, I look up at the six-story sand-color building, with the oval windows and elaborate stonework near the roof, to the floor where W. H. Auden had lived. At least, I always believed he’d lived there. Not sure where I got the idea. But in my teenage years I would walk over to St. Marks Place from home or school, two or three times a week, and stand staring at the window I imagined to be his. I had read that he lived close to here—after a stint in Brooklyn Heights, where he shared a house with Carson McCullers and Benjamin Britten, and that he was a member of the St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery congregation. I look up again tonight and reel in the stars.

  Another resident of Auden’s Brooklyn Heights house was Gypsy Rose Lee, who was known to most people for her principal profession. I knew nothing of that. Gypsy Rose Lee was known to me as the author of two mysteries, Mother Finds a Body and The G-String Murders, whose title ought to have given me a clue.

  YEARS LATER, WHEN I was teaching writing at Harvard, I finally met Auden, which turned out to be a mistake. Occupying the lowest rung of the faculty ladder, I did all the scut work required by the English Department, such as ferrying notable visitors from receptions to readings and everywhere else. Auden visited, and I was to pick him up at Logan Airport. I hardly saw my assignment as scut work, not at first, and I drove through a snowstorm, like the one in his elegy to Yeats, to meet his plane.

  Before I had left for the airport, a student from the Crimson, the Harvard newspaper, had asked me if he could have an interview with the great poet. I told him I’d try. When Auden descended the steps of the plane, in his bedroom slippers, into the snow, and we were walking to my car, I put in the student’s request. “No interviews!” Auden said, which was the only thing he said until we arrived at the Faculty Club, where he was to meet the senior English Department members for lunch. The kid from the Crimson came toward us, pen and pad in hand, and I started to explain Auden’s “no interviews” policy, when the poet waved me aside with a sweep of his arm. “Why, of course I’ll talk to this nice young man,” he said, as I, the horse’s ass, retreated.

  That night, he was shit-faced as well as sour-pussed. And, after a day of driving him here and there in the snow, Marianne Moore, or Richard Wilbur, or Robert Lowell, or anyone else who came to mind usurped him at once as my favorite modern poet. Come midnight, I was returning him to his Cambridge hotel in a near blizzard when, now stewed to the gills, he decided it would be a good idea to exit the car as I was going ten, maybe fifteen, miles per hour. So he opened his door to get out. Only a lingering respect for literature prevented me from letting him do it.

  LITERATURE GETS ON your nerves, but you can’t shake it. I was the world in which I walked. I am a little world made cunningly, said Donne. Yes, sure, as long as we concede that we are mysteries to ourselves, crimes never to be solved. Then the self-satisfied or microcosmic view means only that we are no more or less out of our reach than life itself. Keats relished dwelling in the mystery. Poe feared it. Emily Dickinson, not a bad PI herself,
cautioned the surgeon that under his careful knife lies the culprit, life.

  A man I met, so brilliant in math he made himself one of the richest fortunes in the world. All who spoke of him were excited with awe and amazement. He had solved a math mystery. Einstein and Darwin solved mysteries. Mystery. That’s all there is. There is us. There is the knife. There is life, which is no walk in the park, you know. Or a day at the beach, for that matter.

  IN A DINER on Thirty-eighth and Lex, the waitress approaches. Hair in a bun. Through-the-mill eyes. Am I ready to hear today’s specials? No, thank you. Not quite yet. In an hour. A week at the outs. It is not that I don’t want to hear today’s specials. I just don’t want to hear them now. You understand. So important is the business of hearing today’s specials that I do not wish to rush into it. And, after all, hearing today’s specials is only the beginning of the process. Once I hear today’s specials, I will have to choose among them. And, for every special chosen, how many remain unchosen? Do the unchosen of today’s specials feel less special for that? Are they consigned to a lesser menu, one that lists today’s nonspecials, the ordinary average offerings of today? Am I afraid to choose? you ask. Not at all. I shall be happy with my special, once I make the choice. But I am not the only one involved in the transaction. Until I choose my special, no other special on the menu needs feel slighted. All specials will feel special, as they do now, which befits their designation as today’s specials. And no special’s self-esteem shall be diminished. And all shall be equally special in the eyes of the god of menus. All shall be free. So, you see, that is why I am not ready to hear today’s specials. Not yet. In a year or so. Perhaps. My waitress gives me the once-over. If looks could kill.

  WOMEN MAKE EXCELLENT killers in detective fiction because they catch you off guard, because, whatever you say, you don’t expect the killer to be a woman. The reader takes his eyes off the woman as suspect, as in The Maltese Falcon, where all logic points to Brigid O’Shaugnessy from the start. Mystery writers count on that. In the third Thin Man movie, about a warring wealthy family on Long Island, the killer, Virginia Grey, was not only female, but she was also the daughter of one of the men she bumped off. And Agatha Christie had at least two guilty women in her canon, who killed for love or revenge. Passion more than personal gain comes into play when a woman does it. In most cases, you feel that a woman would not waste her time committing murder for money, and even when she does, as in Double Indemnity and Body Heat, there’s always a man to go with the stash. But slight a woman or betray her or humiliate her or keep her down, and you’d better have eyes in back of your head.

  What would it be like to be a woman, I wonder, a wonder woman, and know everything and say nothing? Men are given an easier time of it, maybe because we die first. So little to do, comparatively. But to be her, for instance, in the puffy pink coat and the cap with the teddy bear ears. Or her as she emerges from D’Agostino, angling her hip to accommodate her two-year-old, who can walk perfectly well on his own two legs but chooses not to. To be that woman who carries someone around unnecessarily, and who was built to do just that? Yes. That one. Another waking dream.

  WAKING DREAMS. SHANK wrote of waking dreams. Subhumans invaded his loft here on Thirty-sixth Street between Fifth and Sixth. They stole a lamp and a vase, and took a shit on his bed. He told me about this with a kind of sad wonder one day when I visited him. The building that contained his loft stood next to Lord & Taylor’s. It is gone, and so is Shank, but not from me, never from me. Jon Beck Shank succeeded Mr. Wilcox as our high school English teacher—the second and last creative light in the dead air of that school—and as my mentor in the detective trade. A poet, he wrote his one book, called simply Poems, while he was in the army. He, too, was fired by the school—not for being gay, though they gladly would have done it for that reason, but rather because Shank had standards. Parents complained to the principal when their kids, all of whom had been persuaded that they were geniuses, got Cs and Ds.

  Here was a school whose Quaker educational vision allowed for the admission of one black student, just one, in the mid 1950s, and whose faculty included several outspoken anti-Semites, a couple of floozies, a leering pedophile who used to loiter around the boys locker room, at least two alcoholics who came to work with booze on their breath, a French teacher who spread rumors about the students, and a biology teacher who taught us that if a fat woman married a thin man, they would have an ordinary-size child. This was the place that fired Shank.

  He would give our class Canada mints and ask us to write what the mint tasted like, to show us how to think in metaphors and similes. He would remove a key word from a line of poetry and tell us to fill in the blank, to see if we could figure out how the poet arrived at the right word. In Eliot’s “Sweeney Erect,” why does the poet use “suds” to describe Sweeney’s face while he shaves? Sweeney, the comic-deadly, beer-drinking lecher. Why not “soap” or “foam”? Because they don’t give us everything about Sweeney the way “suds” does. During this exercise, he would also ask us to pause to appreciate the beauty of the blank space, what discoveries it invited. When we studied Hamlet with him, he had us build an exact model of the Globe Theatre. Then we put on the play.

  Flamboyant, six-foot-one or more, handsome in the way of Franchot Tone, he strode around the school wearing lavender shirts and crimson neckties. “My name is Mr. Shank,” he announced at our very first view of him. “That’s what you’ll call me in class. What you call me outside of class is your own business.” Wit? In that school? And more than witty—attentive, kind, generous. He gave our class books at graduation, each individually appropriate. Me he gave his book.

  He had come to us from the Yale School of Drama, and before that from Brigham Young. He was the first Mormon any of us ever knew. Long after his dismissal, he died blind, from AIDS, I think. Long before that he had written: “People themselves glow in the glass air, slowly / Donning the lucent word as an incandescent sheath / Their waking dreams are become self-resolutions of strength.”

  NEVER HAD MUCH strength myself, unless an absence of fear counts as strength. I recall self-generated fear as a child when I would absorb the story I was reading or the movie I was seeing. But I cannot remember actually being afraid too often. Writing in war zones, I was made afraid not in Sudan or Beirut or even Rwanda—places where fear was both reasonable and rife. Fear made people crazy. During the Israeli bombing of Beirut in 1982, I was sitting in the lobby of the Hotel Continental. The swimming pool outside was empty. When a car bomb went off, a man panicked and jumped in the empty pool, breaking his leg. Just then, another man jumped in to rescue him, breaking his wrist.

  In Belfast, however, I felt a fear so deep it froze me like Emily Dickinson’s snake. And it was born not of bombings or shootings, but rather of the hatred in the air, colder than the day is now, by which one knew how dark the soul could turn. Without any demonstrable cause, you feared for your life.

  Surprise, the element of surprise, can make you fearful in a mystery story—an act of violence in an unexpected place. In Psycho, the most terrifying moment occurs neither in the shower scene, nor at the ending when Mrs. Bates slowly turns toward us, but rather when the detective, Martin Balsam, mounts the stairs in the Bates house, and bewigged Norman, Anthony Perkins, rushes toward him with a knife and stabs him in the head. A scene in an underrated film noir, The Dark Corner, starring the unlikely pair of Mark Stevens and Lucille Ball, achieves the same effect. Clifton Webb, who had hired William Bendix to do a killing, now must get rid of Bendix. In the hallway of an office building, he maneuvers Bendix so that his back is to an open window. Then he pokes him with his walking stick and out goes Bendix, backward. Something about the aristocratic Clifton Webb doing in the big and brutal William Bendix so softly, with a walking stick. So quickly. Just like that.

  JUST LIKE THIS, on Thirtieth between Park and Madison. What gets me is the speed with which he snatched her purse—faster than a cuttlefish’s tongue (if it is a tongue), pre
sto stealo, now you see it now you don’t. The woman, caramel tan, well heeled, and sharp as the black leather purse taken from her, stands still, impressed. She cannot speak, much less scream. She stares after the thief, as if she were about to applaud. The thief, meanwhile, has long disappeared, leaving no trace of himself, like the moon. She smiles like an oyster. Well, can you beat that! she seems to say. And no one can.

  LIKE MOST DETECTIVES, I occasionally turned to crime myself, thanks to Tom Brownell, the son of the future attorney general of the United States, under Dwight David Eisenhower. Tom taught me how to shoplift. “It’s easy,” he said. “Watch me”—as he sauntered into the soda fountain drugstore on the corner of Twentieth and Park, where my dad and I used to go, and swiped a fistful of candy bars. I took just one, but I was never as adept as Tom. The idea was to start with candy and work your way up to the costlier stuff, but I never made the grade, not even with candy. The Fifth Avenue candy bar I stole quavered like the Hindenburg over my bed that night. The following morning, I returned to the drugstore, and when the owner’s head was turned, I restored the Fifth Avenue candy bar to its place on the rack, though I knew it was too late to restoreth my soul.

  Sometimes Tom and I would play at his house after school. Tom’s was a big dirty-white town house on what was called “the block beautiful”—Nineteenth Street between Third Avenue and Irving Place. Ted Husing, a radio sports announcer, had a house there with two black stone jockeys out front, which he painted white in the mid-1950s, to avoid giving offense, I guess. A movie star lived on the block, too, though I did not know her name. Tom’s home, grand and bare, was cold in winter and also in summer. Upon entering after school, he went straight to his daily chore of collecting the dead mice from the traps and flushing them down the toilet. Then we could play.