The Poison Tree

by Henry I. Schvey

  “Yes—that you have a despicable, cruel bastard for a father.”

  “And you think it will be better for me here? Who’s Professor Mosley anyway?”

  “A neighbor from our apartment on Riverside Drive. He teaches History there.”

  “And he can get me into Columbia?”

  “I’m absolutely positive of it!”

  I had a sinking feeling about my mother’s plan that I couldn’t define, except that I wanted no part of it. My mother, however, began to gleefully fantasize about the next four years with me living at home.

  “You know that President Dwight David Eisenhower signed my diploma when I graduated Teacher’s College for my Master’s. I was pregnant with you then, so it’s almost as though you’ve already been matric—”

  “I really think it would be better for me to get away for college—to be on my own.”

  “I wonder who you sound like now? Don’t forget that you’re gifted! It all has to do with your father. Until he left, you had straight A’s.”

  “Mom, I never got straight A’s—not since second grade with Miss Hunt; in fact, that was my high point, academically.”

  “Defeatist! Damned defeatist! Don’t you dare say that—you were always the smartest boy in your class. Remember how you skipped first grade when you got to Hunter? You walked in, could read better than any of them … you could read at three. Doctor Brumbaugh said you were the smartest, most beautiful little boy she had ever seen—those blonde curls! And don’t forget you were potty-trained at six months!”

  “Mom, nobody is ‘potty trained’ at six months. It’s impossible.”

  “SIX MONTHS!” Now things were serious. I had stepped on a land mine. “Listen to me, Henry. I’m talking to you. Please sit down next to me. Please.”

  I did as I was told.

  “Now, as God is my witness you were not only toilet trained at six months, you could read at three years old. You can ask Gramsie if you don’t believe me. You are gifted. And you are God’s own dear child. Do you understand me?”

  “Yes, Mom, if you say so.”

  “Don’t be condescending about it.”

  Even if true, the correlation between toilet training and academic excellence was a principle that eluded me then, and still does. Nevertheless, to my mother, there was an inextricable link between the two. No matter who won our fights, on that one point she never wavered.

  I left for Wisconsin. My mother continued to resent my leaving home, and turned her cheek when I kissed her goodbye. But she hadn’t said anything about transferring to Columbia for several days, and seemed to accept my decision to fly to Madison with my father for orientation and placement examinations in French, Math, and English. In a few days time, I would begin my new life as a college freshman. I was excited to start over in a place where no one knew me, and where I could reinvent myself and become the person I wanted to be. As I sat at a little wooden desk with four No. 2 pencils and a pink eraser, I prepared to begin the first of several placement tests at the University of Wisconsin.

  As I tapped the point on my pencils to make sure they were neither too dull nor too sharp, a man in a crew-cut and bowtie came up beside me, kneeled down and whispered so as not to disturb the others: “You don’t belong here, son.” I had just finished reading The Trial on flight to Madison, and my first reaction to this bizarre comment about not belonging was to believe him. The second was to mumble to myself the mesmerizing opening sentence from my green Modern Library edition of Kafka’s novel: “Someone must have traduced Joseph K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning.”

  I was too nervous to speak. Finally, he planted himself beside me, refusing to go away. I clutched the yellow pencils tightly, which now mocked my abortive independence. I had been admitted, hadn’t I? I had the letter of acceptance to the College of Integrated Liberal Studies in my pocket; I was about to take placement tests like any other freshman. Maybe I was in the wrong room. I got up slowly to check the room number.

  “Isn’t this Room 167, sir?”

  “I don’t think you understand,” he continued gently. “You’re not enrolled at all.”

  Trembling, I pulled out a letter. “Look at the date,” he said. Then he told me that my mother had phoned, demanding my enrollment be rescinded, and the deposit refunded.

  “She said you’re going to Hofstra, I think.”

  I felt my throat constrict, and the glands in my neck go all hot and sweaty.

  “Why don’t we go out into the hall?” the bow-tied man said.

  The hallway was dark wood, and from the ground floor I glanced up and saw an intricate staircase. But I would never be allowed to climb those stairs. I was going back to New York. I couldn’t talk. I needed to run. I saw two giggling girls with hair the color of Wisconsin cheddar; they were laughing, and of course I knew they were laughing at me. I thought of my humiliation on the very first day of second grade when, embarrassed about raising my hand to ask to go to the bathroom, I went in my pants, and the whole class learned about my disgrace as Miss Hunt personally escorted me to the little boy’s room. I walked away from the man in the bowtie with as much dignity as I could summon.

  Once I separated myself from him, I bolted down the hallway and vomited all over the white and black tile of the bathroom floor. Bascom Hall was the central administration building and housed the Chancellor’s office. It had huge white columns outside, and I wondered if the chancellor himself could hear me retching from his office. I hadn’t vomited like that since I was five, and I’d completely forgotten how awful and embarrassing it was: the sounds, the sour taste, the half-digested food, the smell! I felt I should apologize to someone. But there was no one to apologize to, so I got down on my knees and cleaned up the mess with paper towels. Then I knelt down in a different corner of the bathroom, and pressed my forehead against the cold tiles.

  I took a sip of water from the fountain outside the Chancellor’s office, and recovered a bit. I walked back to the Wisconsin Inn where my father was waiting. Here for the express purpose of being on my own, as soon as I arrived, I had thrown up and run to my father. I hadn’t felt this helpless since my bar mitzvah. I knew I would encounter either anger or mockery, possibly both, as I approached our room at the end of the corridor. How could I confess that I had not taken the placement exams?

  I knocked softly, and waited for him to answer the door although I had a spare key in my pocket. The television was on and he had been watching football with a tall Bloody Mary in his hand, a stalk of celery peering over the top of the glass. I said nothing.

  “Just sit down and tell me what happened,” he said calmly.

  “But—but—but,” I stammered.

  “Listen, you have to remain calm, Henry; just breathe. I can’t do anything until you’ve let me in on what has happened.” He didn’t mention my tears, the disheveled state of my clothes, or the vomit stains and smells on my clothes.

  “All right, what happened?” He had a way of astonishing me. Just when I thought I had figured him out, he turned into someone else. When I felt confident, he treated me like dirt; when I had nothing, he was compassionate. I couldn’t understand it, but I was grateful. I stopped sniveling and kissed him. He offered me his fragrant cheek, and held me briefly in his arms as I told him.

  “Sonofabitch! Goddamnsonofabitch Lerner bastard!” I felt much better at the sound of those comforting words.

  What happened was this: while my father and I were flying from New York to Madison, my mother phoned and canceled my registration. She’d planned for me to attend Columbia all along. When she accepted that I couldn’t get into Columbia on my own, she had made a deal for me to go to Hofstra for the fall semester, prove myself with good grades, and transfer to Columbia after Christmas. It was as good as official. I had been accepted and enrolled, without being informed, at Hofstra, a school to which I hadn’t even applied.

  When the Registrar called and told her about freshman pre-orientation, my
mother insisted there had been a mistake. She had legal custody of me, she said, and I was going to Hofstra. She was very, very sorry about the inconvenience. She could be polite and charming when the occasion demanded it, and maintained that I would not be attending Wisconsin.

  My registration was rescinded.

  My father demanded to see the Dean while I lingered nervously outside his office biting my nails. He and my mother were divorcing, he said. It was really my mother who was mistaken. After all, here I was, ready to begin my freshman year and take whatever damn placement tests they wanted. He yanked me in from where I was waiting, and asked if I wanted to be here in Wisconsin. Right on cue I nodded. Did the university require a check to cover the inconvenience? He took out his checkbook and said he would be glad to cover the costs. No, but since they had returned my tuition deposit, would he mind writing a new check out for that same amount? Of course not. As he wrote the check, I noticed the gleaming diamond pinkie ring on his left finger, his elegantly manicured and polished nails, and his gleaming signature signed with the Mont Blanc fountain pen he used only on special occasions. “Well,” the Dean said, “we’re so sorry about all the inconvenience. We’ll get him back into the same dorm, and it will be like nothing ever happened.”

  “Like nothing ever happened.”

  Those words were from a fairy tale. I looked up at my father and he smiled down at me. We’re in this damn thing together, his look said.

  I’ll never forget that day. It was one of those moments where a common foe led to intimacy and reconciliation. He never alluded to my throwing up or crying. In fact, he never mentioned it again. Even at his irrational worst, he never used my past failures against me. Never. Somewhere deep down, he was decent, I argued to myself. Somewhere, deep down, he cared.

  Reflecting on this episode now makes me want to call him in the hospital and remind him of that time in Madison, how much it meant that he stood by me. But might he not remember the episode very differently? Somehow, I can imagine our conversation drifting from my gratitude into some fault: my ignorance about finances or the improper way I raise my children. This has all happened before. So I don’t call. Instead, I think of a passage I recently jotted down from Montaigne: “We are entirely made up of bits and pieces, woven together so diversely and so shapelessly that each one of them pulls its own way at every moment. And there is as much difference between us and ourselves as there is between us and other people.”

  Instead of phoning him, I close my eyes. I imagine myself walking along Jan van Goyenkade, the street in Leiden where we live. I look on the seventeenth-century red brick buildings, sleeping houseboats, and peaceful canals which line our house—all of which might have been painted by Vermeer. I see myself cycling along the Witte Singel, past the bust of Rembrandt van Rijn, Leiden’s most famous citizen. Most of all, I remember that my children are safe at home, growing up in a culture so different from the one I knew. I know they are safe. More than that, they are far from New York.

  I replace the telephone in its cradle.

  For the first week, I was terrified of the bone-biting cold of a Wisconsin winter. But after a few weeks, I enjoyed it. I loved walking along the Lakeshore Path. Walking along Lake Mendota, the wind whipping me in the face so hard I couldn’t breathe. I bought a thick blue turtleneck sweater and a pea coat at the Army-Navy store, and as I walked back along the lake at night I flipped the collar of my pea coat up, channeling Raskolnikov tramping across the Nevsky Bridge in Petersburg. I took out a quarter from my pants pocket and sent it skimming across the frozen lake, imagining I had just tossed my last roubel into the Neva. I prowled Madison’s streets, but screened off the reality of a college town with its bars and Brat Haus; instead, I imagined myself swept up in the mystery and romance of a Russian winter at the end of the nineteenth century.

  I was walking to the library, preparing to meet with the Director of Freshman Composition. He told me to meet him because I was flunking English I: Expository Writing. On my fall midterm exam I had left my bluebook blank—not one word, except for a strange, hallucinatory poem, that even I could not understand when the exams were returned. The graduate assistant who taught the class, Mr. Palven, told me I should immediately report to the Health Center for counseling. Furthermore, he informed Dr. Skinner that I wasn’t welcome in his class anymore. Now I had to explain to Skinner why I should be allowed to finish the course—a flashback to high school. The funny thing was, I read everything in sight—I just wouldn’t read anything required for my classes.

  On my way to meet Dr. Skinner, I thought how poorly I was doing, not only in English Composition, but also in Chemistry, Geology, and Ancient Greek. Why had I taken Greek? Mr. Herman once remarked that every truly educated person needed to be able to read Sophocles in the original. The rest of the class assumed this was one of his typical allusions to our insufficiency, but I took it seriously. So, I signed up for Ancient Greek at 8:50 a.m., Monday through Thursday in my first semester. Unfortunately, I had neither the discipline nor the concentration to succeed. I sat in the back row of Greek class with Dostoevsky’s “White Nights” tucked inside my Greek grammar, like some pervert hiding a dirty magazine on the subway.

  Dr. Skinner was tall and morose, and had an Adam’s apple like Ichabod Crane in The Headless Horseman. He took out my bluebook, and began to click his tongue and make tsking sounds. He must have sat there silently holding the exam for about five long minutes, with only the sounds of his clicking tongue to distract me. Then he asked if I was seeing a psychiatrist; if not, he knew a good one at the Health Service. When I refused, he said that if I ever turned in another exam like that (with or without a poem), I wouldn’t be allowed back, and would receive an F. Because Mr. Palven refused to take me back, he was doing me the favor of transferring me into a different section.

  My life at school wasn’t entirely confined to Dostoevsky and skipping class, however. My friend during that first semester was Dwayne Pfefferkorn. Wearing his white-blond hair in a crew cut, Dwayne had the misfortune of being born in Brillion, Wisconsin, population 800 and something. Dwayne desperately wanted to live this down and keep his origins a secret. At our first meeting during orientation, I casually asked him where he was from, and Dwayne flushed and put his index finger to his lips.

  “I’ll tell you later, in private,” he said. I raised my eyebrows, but let it go. Later that night, over several Old Styles obtained with his fake I.D., Dwayne informed me about his origins. He whispered that nobody knew how Brillion had received its name. Prevailing wisdom was that when the town was founded in 1855, Postmaster T.K. West proposed the name Pilleola, an acronym based on the letters in the names of his two daughters. I wondered what those two daughters’ names might have been—Pilly? Leola?—but Pilleola was rejected by Mr. West’s post office colleagues, and the name was changed to Brillion. Some said it was named for a town in Prussia; others after someone named Brill. No one knew for sure. But for Dwayne, this uncertainty about his hometown made him feel like a bastard and an outcast—forever insecure about his origins.

  Dwayne’s embarrassment about his birthplace made him feel disproportionate excitement when he discovered his roommate was from New York City. Earlier in the summer, when he received word we were going to be roommates, he wrote me a letter asking all about New York and saying how excited he was to make friends with a New York Jew. He was crushed when, after my registration fiasco, he was assigned a different roommate, and I was given a rare single room, probably in compensation for the school’s embarrassment surrounding my registration. Dwayne was even more “ticked,” he said, when they gave my place to some kid from Manitowac who wasn’t “Jewish, Negro, or anything.” Dwayne decided he and I had a special bond, and he came into my room at all hours to “kvetch” (as he put it), about Greg, his Manitowac roommate, who also had white-blond hair and looked like he might have been Dwayne’s twin. Dwayne loved saying the word “kvetch” and used it as often as possible. He knocked on my door when he came back
after his morning lab to see how I was doing. I was still in my pajamas, having overslept and missed Greek again. I believe Dwayne saw himself as my responsible elder brother. He worried about my being sequestered in a single—and was especially concerned about my penchant for cutting classes.

  “Missed Greek again, dincha? Hey—it stinks in here! What’s going on? You smokin’ somethin’?”

  “No, Dwayne, I don’t do that stuff. Anyway, that’s not what marijuana smells like.”

  “So what’s that stink from anyway? I tole ya you’re not supposed to have a hot plate in here!”

  “I wasn’t cooking. I was burning something.”

  “Whatcha been burning?”

  “Nothing.”

  “You gonna flunk it? Greek, I mean.”

  “Probably.”

  “Then why did you take it?”

  “I thought it would be more interesting than it is.”

  “Ancient Greek? First thing in the morning?”

  “Yes, Dwayne, you’re right. I was wrong.”

  “I really don’t mind waking you for Greek class. I have Chem Lab at the same exact time. If we were roommates like we were supposed to be, I wouldn’t let you sleep through classes.”

  “That’s really nice of you, Dwayne. I can get up on my own.”

  “I just don’t want you flunking out, okay?”

  “Thanks, Dwayne. I appreciate it.”

  “Yeah, okay, then.” Exasperated, he brushed his hand through his white blond crew cut.

  Dwayne walked over to my desk, and picked up the envelope lying beside the smoldering ashtray. “Hey, this is from the Selective Service! Is that what you just burnt—your draft card?”

  “No,” I lied. Actually, it was more misdirection than lie. What I had burnt was a letter from the Selective Service asking to verify my student deferment, prior to sending me my draft card. Instead of sending the information back, I burnt the notice.

  “Damn, why’d you do that?”

  “I don’t know.”