by Frank Conroy
The days were emptiness, a vast, spacious emptiness in which the fact of being alive became almost meaningless. The first fragile beginnings of a personality starting to collect in my twelve-year-old soul were immediately sucked up into the silence and the featureless winter sky. The overbearing, undeniable reality of those empty days! The inescapable fact that everything around me was nonhuman, that in terms of snow and sky and rocks and dormant trees I didn’t exist, these things rendered me invisible even to myself. I wasn’t conscious of what was happening, I lived it. I became invisible. I lost myself.
At night I materialized. The outlines of my body were hot, flushed, sharply defined. My senses were heightened. I knew I was real as I animated the darkness with extensions of myself. If the sky was more real than I was, then I was more real than my phantoms.
But the days predominated. The flat sky. As the winter passed a sense of desolation invaded my mind. I wasn’t afraid, it was too nebulous for that, but I was profoundly uneasy. Perhaps in the back of my mind was the fear that everything would go blank, that I would become the sky, without a body, without thought. I remembered the peculiarly impersonal quality of some of the screams in Cottage Eight.
In the spring I started going down to the school just to hang around, walking the four miles with a quarter in my pocket to get a milkshake at the soda fountain in the administration building. I roamed freely through the public rooms. In a scaled-down bowling alley I used to set up the pins for myself after each frame. Sometimes there were movies in the auditorium. I’d wait for a group of boys to come across the lawn behind their counselor and tag along at the end. I remember a conversation I had one day before a Gene Autry picture with a boy who attracted my attention because I thought he looked exactly like me.
“Who’re you?” he asked. “Are you new?”
“No. I’m Mr. Fouchet’s son.”
“He takes our cottage at night sometimes. He’s okay. He never hits you.”
“Do the others?”
“Some of them.”
(Whistles and applause as Mr. Miller, the director of the school, climbs on stage to make a few announcements before the picture. I laugh at the wildness of the audience. They’re having a great time.)
“I’m going home next week,” the boy says. “If you’re around you’ll see the car. It’s a red Buick.”
“We have a Ford.”
“My pop’s a policeman. He carries a gun.”
(More whistles and cheers as the house lights go down and the picture begins. I watch the boy. There’s no way to tell anything is wrong with him.)
The Southbury school affected me more deeply than I realized at the time. Most immediately it was a place in which being different was a good thing—I was different only because I wasn’t feeble-minded. My general loneliness in the world was dramatized microcosmically, in terms favorable to myself.
I believed I was intelligent. For a long time that thought had been important to me. At the school I felt for the first time that my intelligence was worth something to someone else besides myself. Here was a huge organization, an immense, powerful world existing for the inmate, but existing for me as well. I was the other extreme! At last I’d found someplace where my only possession would be relevant! To picture myself as being aware of all this would be a misrepresentation. I wasn’t vain. I didn’t look down on the boys. In some ways I needed the school as much as they did, and I certainly felt closer to them than to the children at conventional schools.
But of course the Southbury School, except for one incident, was as uninterested in me as the world it represented. Which is as it should be. While I passed through the attenuated agonies of growing up, trying to get through to a psychologist in the library of the administration building, there were boys next door who were never going to grow up at all, boys who would starve to death without someone to feed them.
I was alone in the library reading Life magazine. A man stopped in the hallway and looked at me through the double glass doors. I watched him come in without raising my head.
“Hi,” he said casually. “What are you reading?”
“Just this magazine.”
“It’s a good issue. I’ve read it myself.” He spoke to me as if we were old friends. “You remember me, don’t you?”
It came to me in a flash. He’d mistaken me for one of the boys. Perhaps the boy from the movies who looked so much like me. A bewildering array of emotions exploded simultaneously—confusion, embarrassment, a kind of childish love, apprehensiveness, but behind it all, as steady as the solid bar of sunlight across the polished table, triumph. The moment was at hand.
“Of course you’re not really reading it, are you?” he said. “You mean you’re looking at the pictures.”
“No. I’m reading it.”
“Don’t you remember me? I’m Dr. Janetello.”
I hesitated, trying to think up an answer, but he went on.
“Would you mind reading something for me?”
I looked down at the pages. “Members of the Eighty-second airborne reserves bail out over Colorado. Four thousand men took part in a mock attack ...”
“That’s enough,” he said. On the table were two books I’d taken from the shelves. He picked them up. “The Short Stories of de Maupassant and Pickwick Papers. Do you read this too?”
“Yes. I liked David Copperfield so I thought I’d try this.”
“How did you get in here?” he asked quickly. “Are you from Southbury?”
“My stepfather works here.”
“You think it’s clever to play me along like that?”
I didn’t answer. It was going wrong. I looked up at his round face. A few beads of sweat were collected along his upper lip and his eyes suddenly seemed very small.
“Do you have permission to use the library?”
“No. I guess not.”
He stood for a moment without saying anything, as if undecided whether to continue. Then he dropped the books on the table with a bang, turned quickly, and left the room. The double doors continued swinging long after he was gone.
5
Hate, and a Kind of Music
WHEN I was very young, six or seven at a guess, my father installed the family in a large apartment in a good neighborhood. Arranged by mail from the remoteness of a rest home in upper New York State, it was one of the last meaningful gestures he made toward us. My mother was glad to leave the tenement on Fifteenth Street. (An image from the very edge of memory: Late at night my mother stands in the doorway to Alison’s and my room, her face hidden in shadow. “Quiet down now, children. I just heard the weather report and the temperature is over a hundred. Quiet down and go to sleep.”) She was glad to leave the tenement, but worried by the knowledge that her husband was never coming back. At about this time she must have realized she was on her own. He would send money, visit one or twice a year for a day or two, but the hope that he would ever return as head of the house had been gradually relinquished. She was a courageous woman who refused to let life break her. A foreigner without friends or family, she had watched one life collapse, and where a weaker woman might have given up, she reorganized with the idea of building herself another.
The apartment on Eighty-sixth Street was to be a new start. My mother understood that it belonged to her, free and clear. She decided to take a boarder, as much for company as for the money it would bring in. She was already seeing Jean, but he hadn’t started living with us yet, and the huge apartment needed animation. A woman named Daphne responded to the advertisement and took the front room. She stayed two or three years.
Daphne was recently divorced. She was from the Midwest, about my mother’s age, with a pleasant good-humored face and dark hair. The tensions of breaking up with her husband made some of her hair fall out and for a few months she was terrified of losing it all. (Years later, under different circumstances, the same thing was to happen to me.) She earned her living as a therapist for deaf children, a difficult job I imagine she wa
s good at, being gentle and patient by nature. On the basis of their common loss of husbands Daphne and my mother became fast friends. With only the sleeping children in the house they spent their evenings at woman talk, comparing notes on life, men, and the price of eggs, quietly and unhurriedly talking themselves into calmness, as if time would never run out.
Daphne left shortly after Jean moved in, undoubtedly not wanting to intrude on the new family. I have only the best memories of her, a delicate woman who always showed me consideration. She had a particularly nice way of touching my head, very lightly with her fingertips as she must have touched the deaf children.
Lots of people stayed in our house over the years, but most of them for short periods of time. Dull salesmen left quickly, aware of vague inadequacies in themselves, sensing a subtle invasion of their privacy. A sundry assortment of Jean’s mildly nutty pals were given a few days or a week to prove themselves, all moving on when it became clear my mother found their interests irrelevant. She didn’t share Jean’s enthusiasm for clearly recognizable people, people with specialties. All Jean’s pals had some dog-eared passport through life—one was an inventor, another a chess expert, another simply rebellious—sad, lonely men looking for some place to get out of the cold. Jean met them in cafeterias. Only Daphne and one other stayed for any length of time, and where Daphne had moved out rather than intrude, the other stayed on and on, becoming eventually as much a part of the family as any of us, if family is the proper word.
Donald came early and stayed late. He was around, off and on, until I left home at the age of seventeen. He even followed us to Florida once.
The rumor was that Donald had been a child prodigy, an image that must have haunted him, particularly since he still looked like one at the age of thirty-five. Not everyone could see it though; to most people his face was simply another bland, slightly chubby, anonymous American mask. One had to look closely to see the face that lay underneath, the boy’s face, the fifteen-year-old face trapped under the thin layers of fat. His eyes were intelligent and cold, changing very little when he took off his horn-rimmed glasses. He kept his lips compressed, perhaps to make them look less effeminate. His exceptionally strong hands were white and misleadingly soft-looking, and his body, his strange shapeless body, did nothing but fill its clothes without being fat or thin, or indeed anything else to call attention to itself. His appearance was unsettling because it said nothing. He was unmarked.
Donald was a musician, a pianist by trade, who worked most often as an accompanist for various singers because of his great skill as a sight reader. Privately he was interested in composition. He lived on what he earned, which wasn’t much since he was always getting fired because of what my mother called “personality conflicts.” She knew, as even the children knew, that Donald had personality conflicts for the simple reason that he was a bitter and sarcastic man, unable to get along with anyone except at the greatest effort. Even worse, he was unable to control a compulsive desire to hurt people, to hurt them for the pleasure of inflicting pain, deftly, with words, before they had time to defend themselves.
I remember Donald coming home one afternoon, his cheeks flushed and his hands dancing with nervousness. Describing a petty argument with a bus driver, he quoted himself to my mother with all the intensity of a small boy relating a schoolyard triumph. “So I said, ‘Listen my friend, for a crummy thirty-five dollars a week no one expects you to be smart.’ ” (In the almost sexual heat of this kind of battle Donald’s intelligence invariably deserted him.) My mother laughed nervously, not because she thought it was funny, but because her relationship with Donald forced her to laugh. He was the court jester. Donald to a slow waitress: “I’m going to report you. Don’t you dare make a prissy face at me!” He often attacked people who risked losing their jobs if they answered back. People who might retaliate were dealt with more subtly, as we shall see.
My mother met Donald at a studio where she and Jean took singing lessons. The maestro, a man named Herbert, who knew almost nothing about singing and even less about music, had hung out his shingle on the basis of some vague acquaintance with physics and the production of sound. The accompanist was Donald, undoubtedly aware that Herbert was a fake and that neither my mother nor Jean had any talent. But he needed the money.
One can hardly imagine a scene more grotesque than that meeting, the beginning, as it turned out, of a life-long association. Jean, leaning over the piano croaking his heart out with enthusiastic abandon. My mother, a step or two away for the space she needed, mouth open and head tilted back, letting go her seemingly inexhaustible supply of loud sounds in a continuous ear-splitting stream, not so much like a soprano as a volcano. Donald pounding away for his daily bread, his overloaded ears numb with fatigue, and Herbert the impresario dashing back and forth in his Ezra Pound suit, waving his arms in meaningless gestures of exhortation, grabbing himself around the throat on the high notes, pounding his stomach on the low notes, his face twisted like a maniac’s. I remember sitting in a large armchair, my feet off the ground, watching them. In those days there seemed nothing extraordinary about it, except the loudness. I couldn’t possibly have known that it was all fake, a masquerade only slightly more complicated than my own solitary games in Central Park.
Donald moved in with us. Jean was hardly in a position to object, as my mother paid the rent, and in any case it was clear that those elements which would usually complicate the lives of three adults living in the same house were lacking in Donald’s make-up. He was not, as far as I know, homosexual, but something much rarer, a person without sex. Whether he had any direct sexual urges at all, or whether he had them and totally repressed them or rechanneled them is conjectural. All that one could tell about Donald was the obvious fact that he was a person to whom physical love was as remote and insignificant as the canals of Mars. He was aware, of course, that sex played a part in other people’s lives, but for him it was only something to joke about. Most of his sexual references were tainted with a peculiar infantilism. Camel cigarettes had an advertisement in which something called the T-zone was illustrated. Donald went around giggling about the pee-zone years after the ad died out. He was in the habit of washing his small cotton briefs by hand and hanging them around the bathroom on wire hangers, carefully spread out for proper exhibition. (See! I’m clean.)
Donald paid a small rent for his room, and for his inclusion in the family he played for my mother and gave the children piano lessons. He became my mother’s flatterer and clown, a role he enjoyed. She was a strong and independent woman, qualities that he admired, and in addition she posed no sexual threat. She teased him about sex occasionally, but for the most part he was allowed to live as if it didn’t exist. He liked to make her laugh. She laughed easily, at almost any deliberate witticism, and he felt free to make fun of whatever he wanted. He lived vicariously in her laughter, liking the warmth in her voice, liking the sudden and complete reduction of his own lonely and painful life into her all-encompassing, simple, unknowing laugh. She was, it seems clear, a mother to him.
I first began to recognize Donald as an enemy, and an enemy to be reckoned with, when he gave me piano lessons. He would sit nervously at the treble end, impatient and annoyed, as if he were about to leap up and catch a train. Whenever he spoke it was to make a barbed remark. At first his sarcasm didn’t bother me, it was like a game, but as the weeks passed I became more and more uncomfortable, sensing that it wasn’t a game at all, but the symptom of a deep and barely controlled anger.
I couldn’t possibly have realized it at the time but of course he hated me with the clear, impersonal hate one has for a rival. I wasn’t a romantic rival but, incredibly, a sibling rival.
Youth itself made him uncomfortable, more because he coveted the ancient scene of his own lost happiness than for the faint, barely flickering spark of lust it kindled in him. Always the threat of his strong hands—that was what he meant to me. He’d bare his clenched teeth and clamp his iron fingers around my arms a
s if he meant to squeeze them off, or sometimes, with a joke as camouflage, he’d grab my neck and shake me, his fingers carefully squeezing my throat. In those days my neck was skinny enough so that with the thumb and index finger of one hand alone he could almost encircle it. He always squeezed a little too hard, just past the point where it began to hurt. He wasn’t satisfied until he saw in my eyes that he’d reached that point.
The farce of the piano lessons, which he must have hated as much as I did, was short-lived. Far from teaching me anything, the experience kept me away from the piano for a long time. When I finally started learning again I taught myself. (Many years later, during a summer vacation from college, I passed through New York on my way to a job as a pianist in a resort town in Delaware. Donald gave me a few words of advice. “You can’t possibly keep the job so why take it at all?” In fact I did keep it, although at the time I could play in only two keys. It hardly mattered as my audience was always too drunk to notice.)
Donald was a clever and sensitive man. He knew that as long as he stayed on the good side of my mother he could say anything he wanted to Jean or to the children. His relationship with her was static, changing very little through the years. He made few mistakes.
The first, and least serious, was when he hit me. I was nine or ten years old and had forgotten to give him an important telephone message. We were alone in the house, standing in the living room, Donald trembling with rage. I didn’t step back when he approached. No adult had ever struck me before, and I was completely taken by surprise. He did it quickly, with furtive speed, slapping me hard across the face with an open hand. I stared at him, amazed. (The cliché is true, it was as if I saw him for the first time.) His body shook for an instant in some minor spasm and his tight, pain-filled face looked down at me in anguish, expressing shame mixed with a wild and deep satisfaction. I stood stock still and he went away, words shooting from his mouth like steam from a leaky pressure-cooker. He told my mother about it, calling it discipline, but she knew her rights and told him that if anyone hit the children it would be herself.
