Stop-Time

by Frank Conroy

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Copyright Page

  Chapter 1 - Savages

  Chapter 2 - Space and a Dead Mule

  Chapter 3 - Going North

  Chapter 4 - White Days and Red Nights

  Chapter 5 - Hate, and a Kind of Music

  Chapter 6 - Please Don’t Take My Sunshine Away

  Chapter 7 - Shit

  Chapter 8 - A Yo-Yo Going Down, a Mad Squirrel Coming Up

  Chapter 9 - Falling

  Chapter 10 - The Coldness of Public Places

  Chapter 11 - Blindman’s Buff

  Chapter 12 - Nights Away from Home

  Chapter 13 - Death by Itself

  Chapter 14 - License to Drive

  Chapter 15 - Hanging On

  Chapter 16 - Losing My Cherry

  Chapter 17 - Going to Sea

  Chapter 18 - Elsinore, 1953

  Chapter 19 - The Lock on the Metro Door

  Chapter 20 - Unambiguous Events

  Epilogue

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  STOP-TIME

  Frank Conroy was born in New York City in 1936. He attended schools in New York and Florida and was graduated from Haverford College in 1958. He now lives on Nantucket Island, where he writes, reads, plays the piano, and fishes for striped bass. His most recent novel is Body & Soul.

  To Danny and Will

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia

  Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published in the United States of America

  by The Viking Press 1967

  Viking Compass Edition published 1972

  Reprinted 1973 (twice), 1974, 1975

  Published in Penguin Books 1977

  40 39

  Copyright © Frank Conroy, 1965, 1966, 1967 All rights reserved

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

  Conroy, Frank, 1936—

  Stop-time.

  First published in 1967.

  1. Conroy, Frank, 1936——Biography.

  2. Authors, American—20th century—Biography.

  I. Title.

  [CT275.C7643A3 1976] 973 [B] 76-53807

  ISBN : 978-1-101-54949-0

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., for permission to quote lines from “Less and Less Human, O Savage Spirit” (The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens).

  Portions of this book appeared originally, in somewhat different form, in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Partisan Review, and The Urban Review.

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  It is the human that is the alien,

  The human that has no cousin in the moon.

  It is the human that demands his speech

  From beasts or from the incommunicable mass.

  If there must be a god in the house, let him be one

  That will not hear us when we speak: a coolness,

  A vermilioned nothingness, any stick of the mass

  Of which we are too distantly a part.

  —WALLACE STEVENS

  Prologue

  WHEN we were in England I worked well. Four or five hundred words every afternoon. We lived in a small house in the countryside about twenty miles south of London. It was quiet, and because we were strangers, there were no visitors. My wife had been in bed for five months with hepatitis but stayed remarkably cheerful and spent most of her time reading. Life was good, conditions were perfect for my work.

  But I would go to London once or twice a week in a wild, escalating passion of frustration, blinded by some mysterious mixture of guilt, moroseness, and desire. I wasn’t after women, but something invisible, something I never found. I’d get drunk at the Establishment Club and play the piano with the house rhythm section (ecstatic if it went well, sick with disappointment and shame if not, nothing in between), all of this leading up to—in fact nothing more than an elaborate ritualized introduction to—the drive home at three A.M. in my Jaguar. The drive home was the point of it all.

  Fifty to sixty miles an hour through the empty streets of South London. No lights. Slamming in the gears, accelerating on every turn, winding up the big engine, my brain finally clean and white, washed out by the danger and the roar of the wind, I barreled into the countryside. Now the headlights came on, and the speed opened up to ninety and a hundred. Once even to a hundred and fifteen on the narrow, moonlit English road.

  In the few villages along the way I pulled every trick I could think of to make up for the slower speeds, driving in the wrong lane, cutting corners on the wrong side of the pylon, mounting the sidewalks, running red lights—any—thing at all to keep the speed, to maintain the speed and streak through the dark world.

  1

  Savages

  MY FATHER stopped living with us when I was three or four. Most of his adult life was spent as a patient in various expensive rest homes for dipsomaniacs and victims of nervous collapse. He was neither, although he drank too much, but rather the kind of neurotic who finds it difficult to live for any length of time in the outside world. The brain tumor discovered and removed toward the end of his life could have caused his illness, but I suspect this easy out. To most people he seemed normal, especially when he was inside.

  I try to think of him as sane, yet it must be admitted he did some odd things. Forced to attend a rest-home dance for its therapeutic value, he combed his hair with urine and otherwise played it out like the Southern gentleman he was. He had a tendency to take off his trousers and throw them out the window. (I harbor some secret admiration for this.) At a moment’s notice he could blow a thousand dollars at Abercrombie and Fitch and disappear into the Northwest to become an outdoorsman. He spent an anxious few weeks convinced that I was fated to become a homosexual. I was six months old. And I remember visiting him at one of the rest homes when I was eight. We walked across a sloping lawn and he told me a story, which even then I recognized as a lie, about a man who sat down on the open blade of a penknife embedded in a park bench. (Why, for God’s sake would he tell a story like that to his eight-year-old son?)

  At one point in his life he was analyzed or took therapy with A. A. Brill, the famous disciple of Freud, with no apparent effect. For ten or fifteen years he worked as a magazine editor, and built up a good business as a literary agent. He died of cancer in his forties.

  I visited him near the end. Half his face was paralyzed from the brain-tumor operation and jaundice had stained him a deep yellow. We were alone, as usual, in the hospital room. The bed was high to my child’s eye. With great effort he asked me if I believed in universal military training. Too young even to know what it was, I took a gamble and said yes. He seemed satisfied. (Even now I have no idea if that was the answer he wanted. I think of it as some kind of test. Did I pass?) He showed me some books he had gotten to teach himself to draw. A few weeks later he died. He was six feet tall and at the end he weighed eighty-five pounds.

  Against the advice of his psychiatrists my mother divorced him, a long, tedious process culminating a year before his dea
th. One can hardly blame her. At his worst he had taken her on a Caribbean cruise and amused himself by humiliating her at the captain’s table. Danish, middle-class, and not nearly as bright, she was unable to defend herself. Late one night, on deck, his fun and games went too far. My mother thought he was trying to push her over the rail and screamed. (This might be the time to mention her trained mezzo-soprano voice and lifelong interest in opera.) My father was taken off the ship in a strait jacket, to yet another (Spanish-speaking) branch of the ubiquitous rest home he was never to escape.

  I was twelve when my father died. From the ages of nine to eleven I was sent to an experimental boarding school in Pennsylvania called Freemont. I wasn’t home more than a few days during these years. In the summer Freemont became a camp and I stayed through.

  The headmaster was a big, florid man named Teddy who drank too much. It was no secret, and even the youngest of us were expected to sympathize with his illness and like him for it—an extension of the attitude that forbade the use of last names to make everyone more human. All of us knew, in the mysterious way children pick things up, that Teddy had almost no control over the institution he’d created, and that when decisions were unavoidable his wife took over. This weakness at the top might have been the key to the wildness of the place.

  Life at Freemont was a perpetual semihysterical holiday. We knew there were almost no limits in any direction. A situation of endless, dreamlike fun, but one that imposed a certain strain on us all. Classes were a farce, you didn’t have to go if you didn’t want to, and there were no tests. Freedom was the key word. The atmosphere was heavy with the perfume of the nineteen-thirties—spurious agrarianism, group singing of proletarian chants from all countries, sexual freedom (I was necking at the age of nine), sentimentalism, naivete. But above all, filtering down through the whole school, the excitement of the new thing, of the experiment—that peculiar floating sensation of not knowing what’s going to happen next.

  One warm spring night we staged a revolution. All the Junior boys, thirty or forty of us, spontaneously decided not to go to bed. We ran loose on the grounds most of the night, stalked by the entire faculty. Even old Ted was out, stumbling and crashing through the woods, warding off the nuts thrown from the trees. A few legitimate captures were made by the younger men on the staff, but there was no doubt most of us could have held out indefinitely. I, for one, was confident to the point of bravado, coming out in the open three or four times just for the fun of being chased. Can there be anything as sweet for a child as victory over authority? On that warm night I touched heights I will never reach again—baiting a thirty-year-old man, getting him to chase me over my own ground in the darkness, hearing his hard breath behind me (ah, the wordlessness of the chase, no words, just action), and finally leaping clean, leaping effortlessly over the brook at exactly the right place, knowing he was too heavy, too stupid as an animal, too old, and too tired to do what I had done. Oh God, my heart burst with joy when I heard him fall, flat out, in the water. Lights flashed in my brain. The chase was over and I had won. I was untouchable. I raced across the meadow, too happy to stop running.

  Hours later, hidden in a bower, I heard the beginning of the end. A capture was made right below me. Every captured boy was to join forces with the staff and hunt the boys still out. My reaction was outrage. Dirty pool! But outrage dulled by recognition—“Of course. What else did you expect? They’re clever and devious. Old people, with cold, ignorant hearts.” The staff’s technique didn’t actually work as planned, but it spread confusion and broke the lovely symmetry of us against them. The revolution was no longer simple and ran out of gas. To this day I’m proud that I was the last boy in, hours after the others. (I paid a price though—some inexplicable loss to my soul as I crept around all that time in the dark, looking for another holdout.)

  We went through a fire period for a couple of weeks one winter. At two or three in the morning we’d congregate in the huge windowless coat-room and set up hundreds of birthday candles on the floor. They gave a marvelous eerie light as we sat around telling horror stories. Fire-writing became the rage—paint your initials on the wall in airplane glue and touch a flame to it. At our most dramatic we staged elaborate take-offs on religious services, complete with capes and pseudo-Latin. We were eventually discovered by our bug-eyed counselor—a homosexual, I recognize in retrospect, who had enough problems caring for thirty-five boys at the brink of puberty. As far as I know he never touched anyone.

  Teddy announced a punishment that made the hair rise on the backs of our necks. After pointing out the inadequacies of the fire-escape system he decreed that each of us would be forced to immerse his left hand in a pot of boiling water for ten seconds, the sentence to be carried out two days hence. Frightened, morbidly excited, we thought about nothing else, inevitably drawn to the image of the boiling water with unhealthy fascination. We discussed the announcement almost lovingly till all hours of the night, recognizing a certain beauty in the phrasing, the formal specification of the “left hand,” the precision of “immersed for ten seconds”—it had a medieval flavor that thrilled us.

  But Teddy, or his wife (it was done in her kitchen), lost his nerve after the screams and tears of the first few boys. The flame was turned off under the pot and by the time my turn came it didn’t hurt at all.

  The only successful bit of discipline I remember was their system to get us to stop smoking. We smoked corn silk as well as cigarettes. (The preparation of corn silk was an important ritual. Hand-gathered in the field from only the best ears, it was dried in the sun, rubbed, aged, and rolled into pipe-sized pellets. We decimated Freemont’s corn crop, ineptly tended in the first place, by leaving ten stripped ears rotting on the ground for every one eventually harvested. No one seemed to mind. Harvest day, in which we all participated, was a fraudulent pastoral dance of symbolic rather than economic significance.) With rare decisiveness Teddy got organized about the smoking. The parents of the only non-scholarship student in the school, a neat, well-to-do Chinese couple, removed him without warning after a visit. The faculty believed it was the sight of students lounging around the public rooms with cigarettes hanging expertly from their rosy lips, while we maintained it was the toilet-paper war. The parents had walked through the front door when things were reaching a crescendo—endless white rolls streaming down the immense curved stairway, cylindrical bombs hurtling down the stairwell from the third-floor balcony to run out anticlimactically a few feet from the floor, dangling like exhausted white tongues. The withdrawal of the only paying student was a catastrophe, and the smoking would have to stop.

  Like a witch doctor, some suburban equivalent of the rainmaker, Mr. Kleinberg arrived in his mysterious black panel truck. Members of the staff were Teddy, George, or Harry, but this outsider remained Mister Kleinberg, a form of respect to which it turned out he was entitled. We greeted him with bland amusement, secure in the knowledge that no one could do anything with us. A cheerful realist with a big smile and a pat on the shoulder for every boy in reach, he was to surprise us all.

  The procedure was simple. He packed us into a small, unventilated garage, unloaded more cigarettes than the average man will see in a lifetime, passed out boxes of kitchen matches, and announced that any of us still smoking after ten packs and five cigars was excluded from the new, heavily enforced ban on smoking. None of us could resist the challenge.

  He sat behind his vast mound with a clipboard, checking off names as we took our first, fresh packs. Adjusting his glasses eagerly and beaming with friendliness, he distributed his fantastic treasure. The neat white cartons were ripped open, every brand was ours for the asking—Old Gold, Pall Mall (my brand), Chesterfields, Wings, Camels, Spud, Caporals, Lucky Strike (Loose Sweaters Mean Floppy Tits), Kools, Benson & Hedges. He urged us to try them all. “Feel free to experiment, boys, it may be your last chance,” he said, exploding with benevolent laughter.

  I remember sitting on the floor with my back against the wall. Bruce,
my best friend, was next to me.

  “We’re supposed to get sick,” he said.

  “I know.”

  We lighted up a pair of fat cigars and surveyed the scene. Forty boys puffed away in every corner of the room, some of them lined up for supplies, keeping Mr. Kleinberg busy with his paperwork. The noise was deafening. Gales of nervous laughter as someone did an imitation of John Garfield, public speeches as so-and-so declared his intention to pass out rather than admit defeat, or his neighbor yelled that he’d finished his fourth pack and was still by God going strong. One had to scream through the smoke to be heard. It wasn’t long before the first boys stumbled out, sick and shamefaced, to retch on the grass. There was no way to leave quietly. Every opening of the door sent great shafts of sunlight across the smoky room, the signal for a derisive roar—boos, hoots, whistles, razzberries—from those sticking it out. I felt satisfaction as an enemy of mine left early, when the crowd was at its ugliest.

  The rest of us followed eventually, of course, some taking longer than others, but all poisoned. Mr. Kleinberg won and smoking ended at Freemont. With dazed admiration we watched him drive away the next day in his black truck, smiling and waving, a panetela clamped between his teeth.

  A rainy day. All of us together in the big dorm except a fat boy named Ligget. I can’t remember how it started, or if any one person started it. A lot of talk against Ligget, building quickly to the point where talk was not enough. When someone claimed to have heard him use the expression “nigger-lipping” (wetting the end of a cigarette), we decided to act. Ligget was intolerable. A boy was sent to find him.