The Boy Detective

by Roger Rosenblatt

  On a winter night, Tudor City feels no more lifeless than it does on a summer day. Hard to know why. I walk in and out as I did when I was a boy detective, no suspects in sight, with no residual interest in the place except for the fact that my parents lived here before I was born. My mother described their Murphy bed, which disappeared into a wall. An innocent detail. My one noteworthy item about Tudor City.

  WHAT DO YOU think, pal? Is there such a thing as an innocent detail? Apparent guilt means innocence, apparent innocence, guilt? It’s nonsense, of course. But that’s what Perry Mason was about, and Miss Marple and Nick Charles, and Charlie Chan, too. Holmes was made of subtler stuff. Assemble the suspects, as Nick Charles pronounced the word, in one room. Scan the crowd from face to face. And the one who bears the blandest expression, who appears to have no reaction to the event, and seems to be present in the lineup merely as filler, he or she is the one. “You are murderer,” says Charlie Chan to the least demonstrative of the lot.

  I suppose it’s the mystery writer’s version of the appearance versus reality business taught in university literature courses. But it doesn’t wash in life. In life, just as often, the guilty look guilty, the innocent look clean as a whistle, and everyone looks every possible way. In my own childhood pursuits of the killer, I never assumed that he would look anything but guilty, if he appeared to me at all. The light of hell in They Might Be Giants. In my many childhood wanderings, I could imagine something similar. Oddly, I could never foresee my bringing my criminal to justice or even taking him down in a shoot-out. But I could see myself facing him and finding my triumph in that moment of confrontation.

  And I wondered what my quarry would find in that same moment. Would he look upon his adversary, his nemesis, and be afraid? Or would he assess me top to bottom, boy that I was, and conclude that I was as he always had imagined me? And would he have surprised me with a twist of plot and lashed out, “You are murderer”?

  CAN YOU DIRECT me to the National Arts Club?

  Can you direct me to the fish market?

  Do you happen to know the location of the nearest public library?

  Do you happen to know where a guy can get laid around here?

  Where’s a cop when you need one?

  Am I going east or west? I’m going south?

  Are you from here?

  Do I know you?

  YOURS IS THE clarity, the shape, and the theme. Mine is the shambles. And if I say that I am lost in admiration of you, while that is true, it is truer that I am lost, period, lost in everything. Nonetheless, I proceed even without a course or destination. Without a firm location, I proceed. Are most things nowhere? Stars, for instance. Isn’t space the antithesis of place? Or can an object be tethered to nothing? By what do stars read their own positions?

  But I probably am wrong in my premise. The “you” I address who seems to have clarity, shape, and a theme is more likely a fiction reserved for strangers. Or for people one invents to look down on. No one has clarity, shape, and a theme. The detective only has the lives of other people under control. His own is in shambles, the very material he draws on to solve his cases and close his books. Shambles. The headlights of cars fill your face, clear as rain. Do I know you?

  WHO DOES SHE remind me of, the one in the red-checkered scarf, looking up at me now, startled, as if I were a car horn, before trudging on in the cold? I know. I was giving a talk in Washington at the Hay-Adams Hotel, on a piece I’d done for the New York Times Magazine. And this young woman—brown hair, soft voice, sad eyes that kept her beauty in the background—walked up to say that her husband, who had been killed somewhere, had been moved by something I had written sometime, and that she had read whatever it was herself, and that it had helped her, somehow. But there was more to her than that, and more to the way we came together in the public room. And then there was someone else saying something else, and all at once she was borne away with the crowd, as if on a raft blown by the wind. And at the end of my talk, there was more chatter still, with strangers, and I had lost sight of her, until, outside the Hay-Adams, as my hired car started off, there she was again, standing in front of the others, looking directly through the car window at me. And what I might have done was to tell the driver to stop, to have flung open the car door, to have taken her small hand and pulled her inside, beside me, on that black leather seat, and asked her about her husband and her life.

  Love at first sight? It wasn’t that. There is no such thing as love at first sight, because it takes the imagination a while to dream up what love is. The one you catch sight of, on whom you have bestowed your sudden love, may be, at best, the perfect being revealed to you only after all the imperfect beings who preceded her. And if that is so, then love at first sight means love at last, the opposite of what it says. None of this applies to the one in the red-checkered scarf, since I have known my love-at-last since high school. Still, I might have spoken with her, so that we could have exchanged parts of our lives, in a world where daughters and husbands drop like flies. So that’s who she reminds me of, the one in the red-checkered scarf.

  CLEAVE ME INTO my parts and make me choose? I’d pick the heart over the head any day, because everybody is smart, you know, but not everybody is kind. That fellow with the lowered eyes, who sits in the frosted window of the print shop at Fortieth and Third, what words can I bring to ease his burden? None. Not a single intelligent word. But I could sit beside him on a stool and say nothing. That I could do. A tear is an intellectual thing, said Blake.

  The thing about John Lewis playing Bach, you see, is that his right hand plays Bach straight, as it’s written, and his left hand plays jazz and does the improvising. You might say that his left hand lives in the moment, and his right hand in the past. You get the allusion? Hear what I mean? Or, am I beating a dead horse?

  I’D SAY WE were nearing the end of our illimitable walk, but as you know, that cannot be. I may be near the end of my personal walk, but that’s a smaller matter. So let’s just say that I am at Fifty-first and Lex, which is a bit north of my range. I am here nonetheless, because the Loew’s Lexington movie theater used to be here, with its pool of glittering goldfish in the center of the lobby. Neighborhood kids passed whole Saturdays at the Loew’s. We were herded into the children’s section patrolled by “matrons” with white uniforms and great thick hands, and we watched a double feature of A and B movies, short subjects, such as the Pete Smith comedies, the glorious cartoons of Chuck Jones, and Movietone News. We would arrive at the theater at ten in the morning, cough up our twenty-five cents for admission, and be out no earlier than four in the afternoon.

  It was here that I saw the noir film Shadow on the Wall, which presented a lesson on how to make use of confusing information in a murder case and elsewhere. Shadow on the Wall was about a girl my age, eight or nine, and I saw it at the time I was sleeping in my parents’ bedroom and was watching shadows on the ceiling. The little girl witnesses a murder committed by a woman who killed her sister in a jealous rage. The murderess wore a hat with a prominent feather. So traumatized is the little girl that she temporarily loses her memory, and all she can tell the police is that the murderer was an Indian. The murderer, knowing that the girl’s memory will return, plans to kill her.

  Down the length of Lexington Avenue we kids would walk in the late afternoons dueling with invisible swords if the movie we had just seen was Scaramouche, or howling through the jungle, if the movie was Tarzan. Past the place that sold candy apples and caramel apples. Past the Army, Navy and Marines Club, twin gray town houses with American flags sticking out on poles. Past Joe’s Photo Shop on Twenty-fourth, where I had my first job, at age eleven, sweeping out the store on early Saturday mornings and earning two dollars, so that I had a fortune to take to the movies. Past the George Washington Hotel, where I got haircuts and smelled of witch hazel. Then down to Gramercy Park, where Lexington Avenue ends or begins, depending on one’s perspective.

  Traffic moved two ways on Lex in those days
. When the one-way change was instituted, and all the cars moved south toward the park, drivers at night would often build up a head of steam, hurtle down the avenue, and plough into the Gramercy Park gate. Awakened, I would hear them yell, “Who put this park here!” A conversation-stopper, in case you run out: Lexington Avenue was the site of the first speeding ticket issued in New York, in 1899. A cabdriver was pulled over for going twelve miles an hour.

  The avenue, so important to us kids, is not known for much history. An anarchist bombing occurred here in 1914. And a few years ago, there was an explosion at Forty-first Street, when a geyser of steam scalded dozens of pedestrians. To anyone who has seen The Seven Year Itch, Lexington Avenue is where Marilyn Monroe stood over an IRT subway grate in front of the Loew’s Lexington movie theater, her white skirt billowing up to heaven.

  Down from Fifty-first Street again tonight, walking toward Gramercy Park. The avenue funnels bright before me like the barrel of a gun, and the winter sky turns purple. From Shadow on the Wall a detective learns that when faced with information that makes no sense yet comes from a reliable source, you need to imagine an explanation. Take a leap. When you have eliminated the impossible, what remains, however improbable, must be the truth. Don’t look for the Indian. Look for the feather.

  SOMETHING FAULKNER SAID in Light in August: “Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders.” He seems to think of memory as a kind of faith. And he is proved right, if we dredge up old Jay Gatsby, believing with all his might in the past as he attempts to re-create it. And Daisy, the worthless object of desire, the flimsy embodiment of the past herself, could not care less. Yet Gatsby keeps the faith.

  So, does this mean that a memoir is an act of faith, and that the various worlds we write into creation represent our way of making a heaven and a church—all the things that receive belief? A god itself? We might ask ourselves why this form of writing exists. And the answer may be that the memoir is an instrument by which we redo our lives in order to have something to believe in. As unhappy or confused as our memories may be—as chilling or terrifying or just plain sad—the accretion of them, nonetheless, becomes a kind of altar at which we worship. The structure constitutes our salvation. Quasimodo cries out to the cathedral of Notre Dame, If only I were made out of stone like thee. The church, our Lady of Memory, becomes our sanctuary.

  Which is to say, students, your memoir is not about you. So, stay out of it. Keep clear of your memoir, except in those instances where your idiosyncratic, weird, freakish life speaks for others, for all lives. As you write, let your mind wander, for wandering is necessary for your memoir. Let your mind wander to subjects outside your worries, shames, griefs, and traumas—no matter how devastating or exciting they may be—to history, plain facts, abstract thoughts, and to the people for whom you write. At the outset of a memoir, you are propelled by the desire to let the world know who you are. Soon you will discover that you don’t really care that much about who you are, and that writing with that goal alone will turn boring, cloying. You will tire of yourself just as you tire of others who think only of themselves, and whose chatterings are mere perseverations of autobiography.

  I’ll say it again. Your life is not about you. Or to put it more usefully, it is about the you in you that is common to everyone. Your life is about everyone. In his tender Autobiography, the poet Edwin Muir describes his emotional awakening after undergoing psychoanalysis for the first time. “I saw that my lot was the human lot,” he writes. And “in my own unvarnished likeness, I was one among all men and women.” To see that is not only to acknowledge something essential about one’s life. It also serves the writing of the memoir by diverting the reader’s attention from the one to the many, while at the same time, the one uses the many to try to discover who the one really is and what his story is about. Your memoir is not about you. You are the world in which you walk, you and everyone else, to boot.

  “THIS IS WHERE Daddy was born,” says Ginny with a sweep of her arm. Our three children inspect Gramercy Park as if they might uncover mementos of my birth. Arrowheads. Here memory recalls memory. The scene is a floral print. I feel powerful and useless in my stride, the way the giants of fairy tales must feel when they encounter heroes of normal size. The gravel crunches under our feet. Soon it is Verdun, and I am trying to rush ahead of Ginny and the kids in order to take the first volley of shells. Bullets fly like apples. I am shouting, “Down! Get down!” Then it is spring again. Everyone is okay.

  WHAT IF WE thought of time not as a measurement and not as an abstraction, but rather as a place—a city, for instance, or a part of a city, or a park—a place you can leave yet never leave? In your mind, of course. We are speaking of your mind. Yet this city, or part of a city, or park, does nothing to you, the way time, normally defined, can. And you can do nothing to it, the way you can waste time, normally defined, or kill it. Time seen as a place simply serves you as a permanent point of reference. And, like any old place, there are good things associated with it, and bad. But neither good nor bad, happy thoughts or unhappy thoughts, or feelings of anxiety or serenity or any feeling at all has the slightest effect on the fact that this is your place in the world. Period. Here you stand, or walk. And here you wait to see whatever will happen to you, which turns out to be the very thing that is happening to you as you stand, or walk.

  So, if you buy the hypothesis, this is your place of time. It is here that you recognize yourself, however dimly, and here that you steady yourself when need be, and regroup. The where is the when. And if you should happen to wear a wristwatch in the where, the watch’s face would show neither hands nor numbers, but rather trees, shops, even yourself, your image. What? Do you think the world would be worse off if this were so? If you put your mind to it, could you not intuit a train schedule, or the minutes it takes to cook an egg? If you put your mind to it, whenever someone asked you the time, could you not look at your wrist and answer, “My home. My silent home”?

  AFTER WEEKEND PERFORMANCES, I would head downtown to visit my mother in the Bialystoker Nursing Home on the Lower East Side, not far from Hester Street, where she used to teach. The performances were of a one-man show I wrote in 1991, called Free Speech in America, at the American Place Theatre. Some great plays were put on at the American Place, directed by its founder, Wynn Handman, such as William Alfred’s Hogan’s Goat and Robert Lowell’s The Old Glory. Mine was hardly in that category. Yet it got a rave from the New York Times, thus what I expected to be a three-week run turned into a small hit that ran six months. Not being an actor, I ran out of steam and finally called a halt to it. I was spending as much on cab fare to and from the theater as I was making for the play. You know what they say: “You can make a killing in the theater, but not a living.”

  By then, my mother lived in the impenetrable darkness of Alzheimer’s. The Bialystoker home was not fancy but clean and efficiently run, and the nurses were attentive. The floors were linoleum and the walls too brightly lit. The home smelled of soap and old people, who lay in beds not far from one another, separated by screens. A belligerent little woman used to roll nonstop through the aisles in her wheelchair at ridiculous speeds, cursing and complaining, her small hard face like a boxing jab. My mother rarely spoke. Once she mentioned that Mr. Homer had made a pass at her and had wanted to marry her after my father died. She smiled saying that. There was a two-week interval in which she was lucid, so much so that Ginny and I asked the doctor if my mother was actually getting better. He said such spasms of clarity were normal, and that she would slide back to the unreachable country, and she did. She usually recognized me, but often she would just smile or stare. Whenever Peter and Ginny joined me, she looked as if she knew us. Most of the time when I sat alone beside her bed, we maintained the silence that was familiar to us both.

  ASSUMING THAT YOUR head has cleared in death, Mother, could you possibly spare a few minutes? I’d like to tell you something I’ve learned from
a lifetime of detective work. I promise not to ask unseemly questions. You would not be accused. You would not be put on trial to explain yourself (as if that were possible for any of us). The maple leaves would rise and fall around us—say we were sitting on a park bench, one of the benches with commemorative plaques. Sparrows would peek out of their little holes in the birdhouse. At other benches, the Gramercy women would be speaking of Switzerland and the Catholic Church. Your cronies at the Marshall Chess Club would be on hand if you should need them, and your mother, too, and Patta, and your sister Julia, perhaps even Peter and Dad. And there would be other people, sights and sounds you are comfortable with, so you would have no cause for anxiety. Then, when you were at ease and assured that all was safe, and that I meant well, I would tell you, after a long embrace, and though I did not mean it, that I no longer wish to be right.

  ROUND AND ROUND the park. Round and round. My favorite part of being a detective is just this—the walk, just taking in the world. Soon enough someone will engage us on a hunt, a project. And off we will go, armed to the hilt with whatever powers we possess, of reason, deduction, and style. We shall put our powers to use for the sake of honor, decency, and justice. And that’s all to the good, just as it should be in a life that yearns for honor, decency, and justice.

  But before all that, and afterward, too, life calls for nothing but itself. And we do not so much pursue it as let it wrap around us, and just as quickly, unwrap, like the wind. Now that I think about it, the reason I sat at the kitchen window working on the sill day after day may have had less to do with the digging than with what it had avoided. The dog that did not bark. The digging into the marble sill may simply have been a diversion from the world I saw whenever I looked up. My view. And I was so overwhelmed with what lay before me, the grand endless mystery that opened before me, that I averted my gaze for fear of being blinded. For past the window lay the city, and the pitch of the rooftops, and the pulse of the clouds, and the black water tanks, and the trees reaching up and the people reaching up, and everyone and everything murmuring in a silent chorus, “We’re alive.” I felt that myself. “I’m alive.” And I may have realized, in the hidden way that children realize things, that the idea of life, wondrous life, was stronger and more durable than any assaults, loud or silent, that of all the gifts my world afforded whenever I walked out into it, the most terrifying and miraculous was this announcement, “I’m alive,” enforced with every step.