A Boy's Own Story (10 page)

This precocious role I took in the world was possible only because the world seemed so unreal, the stage transected by lights, its fourth wall missing in order to afford a view to thronged but shadowy spectators. Everything I did was being watched. If I turned right rather than left, someone took careful notice. If I repeated a magic phrase, the words were recorded and obeyed. Those spectators were certainly real, though I did not know them yet, but what they were watching, this dumb show in which I played such a decisive role—it was merely a simulacrum of actual feelings. These tears were paste. What was slowly dawning on me was my extreme importance, something the audience had long ago suspected. Who were they, these spectators? I'd look up into the evening sky to see them ranked in blowing white robes, the hems wet with blood. When I had a fever I could hear them.

We moved to a city several hundred miles to the north and there we lived in a luxury hotel, sedate and respectable, a place with goldfish in a low marble pool in the lobby and a small velvet settee on the elevator. On the top floor a valet steamed and pressed clothes in a closet beside the double doors that opened onto a ballroom. The windows of the ballroom were heavily and perpetually draped and curtained, but I discovered a tiny door just two panes high that led out onto a narrow balcony. This balcony obviously was not intended to be used, just a strip of gravel over tar behind an escarpment of stone ornamental urns. In good weather I'd hide on this secret balcony and read; my favorite book was about the lost dauphin. On some days the ballroom was set up with long banquet tables bearing napery and floral arrangements between rows of gilt and velvet chairs. Other days the room would smell of stale cigarette smoke and the tables would have been stripped to their scarred wood tops and pipe-metal bases.

As a little boy I'd scarcely known my mother; she'd seldom been home and I'd been left to my nurse. Sometimes at night, after I'd gone to bed, Mother would perch beside me for a moment before she went out for the evening. She smelled of a rich, unfamiliar perfume and her face glimmered behind a full veil drawn down under her chin, the net woven here and there with dark birds in flight, her hands encased in tiny white leather gloves of a morbid softness. Then she'd sing to me in her thin, high, quavering voice, "I'll Be Seeing You in Apple Blossom Time." The birds would seem to move when she sang and in my drowsiness I imagined they, too, were serenading me.

Now I saw her much more and she became more real to me. She had wonderful brown eyes, sharp and clear, that changed with her many moods, as pearls are said to respond to the different bodies that wear them. She cried easily, when her feelings had been hurt. When she cried I became frantic and held on to her until she stopped. I wanted her to be happy, and I saved up money to buy her presents; if the gifts were ignored I felt powerless and dejected. She could also be sharp-eyed. Though she was in fact impetuous and extravagant, she would occasionally put on her glasses, stick out her chin and ponder a legal or business document for hours. She sat perfectly still on the edge of a chair, her feet barely touching the floor since she was so short.

She had no humor beyond a low country cackle at things that were silly or naughty. At such times she'd sound like her own mother, an illiterate farm woman who crowed over traveling-salesman stories, slapped her knee and then wriggled like a wet bird back into smooth-feathered sobriety. My mother had no interest in what she called "theory," by which she meant ideas. What did interest her were plans and arrangements—all the details of daily life. These elicited her full attention, and mastering them brought her the pleasant feeling that hers was a tidy life. Plans were my despair; the minute maps were drawn out of a glove compartment or a calendar was consulted, I retreated into irritable daydreams.

My mother's interest in plans and arrangements coexisted with the most peculiar notion of what those arrangements should consist of—and a wild caprice that could overturn everything she'd worked out so methodically. Naïve and proud at the time of her divorce, she wanted to conserve money but also maintain a good address. She decided the three of us should live in that expensive hotel in one furnished room with twin beds, my sister and I taking turns sleeping on the floor. For the first time in her life our mother had a job, one at which she worked long hours. At night she was going out on dates or haunting nightclubs downtown. Because she was seldom at home I ate most of my suppers alone in the hotel dining room; my sister ate at a different hour in order to avoid my company.

Before her divorce my mother had never so much as written a check. Now our fortunes teetered and careened and ground to a halt. She bought a knee-length mink but economized on food, bought a flashy Lincoln convertible but refused to send my sister to the orthodontist, packed us off to expensive summer camps but on the bus, not the train. She drank heavily and played sentimental records in the evening on the few nights she stayed home; one winter the record of "Now Is the Hour" became so worn the spindle hole grew as big as a dime, but still the voice yearned on and on. Another winter the voice, wobbling sickeningly, sang "The Tennessee Waltz."

When Mother was discouraged a smell of physical self-hatred would come off her body; she groaned her way through her self-hatred as though it were a mountain of laundry she had to wash, a dirty, physical, humiliating task. Then something nice would happen. Someone would compliment her or a man would take an interest in her—and presto, she was not only equal to other people but superior to them. The terrible laundering would be forgotten. She'd sit up very straight in her chair and smile a sort of First Lady smile.

I spent many gala nights, including my eighth, ninth and tenth birthdays, in nightclubs beside my mother. She'd split a simple pasta dish with me to save money and then order highball after highball as we'd look longingly toward the man at the bar. Had he noticed Mother? Would he send her a drink? Or would he be scared off by my presence?

My mother had met a handsome man much younger than she who wanted her to buy him a fishing camp in Kentucky; luckily his greed finally caused her to drop him. On the way down to join him one time in Kentucky, Mother kept the radio tuned to a hillbilly station, but my sister and I mocked the corn-pone accents and sad lyrics. Once we were in Kentucky the handsome man, mustached and cologned, took us out fishing in a rented boat. It rained. No one caught anything. A strict silence had to be maintained when the man cast his rod as though blessing the waters. At night my sister and I slept in bunk beds in the man's sister's house. My mother wore a new, dazed expression and treated us with great politeness, as though my sister and I were guests she didn't know very well. She spoke of our accomplishments and of her own trials and powers of recuperation. The man laid a strong hand on my shoulders, but withdrew it when my mother left the room. At night his family and ours sat together; everyone visited as a bowl of pecans and a nutcracker were passed around the room from one grown-up to another on down to silent children in pajamas stained with orange juice. Our mother was betraying us into this dingy house permeated by the smell of hot grease. Mother was losing interest in me; she'd willingly hand me over to this good-looking fool.

During the night they fought. The engagement was broken off and the next morning we were in the car again, blinking and exhausted, the radio blaring, the temperature noticeably warmer, familiar plants unseasonably in bloom. Mother started reciting the litany of our lives. She questioned us once more about our father and how he behaved toward his new wife. Each twisted or colored fact we gave her she plaited into a heavy weave. Then she tore that up and started again. He would soon leave his wife or he would never leave her, he was being blackmailed by that woman, no he loved her, he was a man of honor, no he was a man without principle, he had failed us, no he stayed true, he'd tire of her, no she was a born fascinator, this was just an adventure, it was a life, she made him feel superior, she made him feel cheap, he'd soon be back or he'd never return—oh, my mother was a tedious Penelope weaving her tales and tearing them up.

I listened to everything, smiling and in possession of my secret power.

And then there were her other men—the one in California with all the money, who was Catholic and brought brandy alexanders to Mama's bedside in the morning. Or the captain in the army with the sports car whom she'd met at Hot Springs, Arkansas. Or the Jew in Chicago with the sailboat, the Camel cigarettes and the skin that tanned so easily. We'd analyze their motives hour after hour as the towns and countryside sped past. We'd sing songs. We'd listen to the news. We'd point out sights to one another. But soon we'd be talking again about Herb or Bill or Abe. Did he miss our mother? What were his intentions? Was he dating anyone else? Should Mom play harder to get?

Mother gained weight, sighed beside the phone, cried, hypothesized, thought up schemes of seduction or revenge, and all her technique—that is, all her helplessness—made my sister more and more ashamed of her. We were losers who talked a winning game. No wonder honesty came to mean for my sister saying only the most damaging things against herself. If she
began
by admitting defeat, then something was possible: sincerity, perhaps, or at least the avoidance of appearing ludicrous.

My mother's helplessness filled my sister with confusion and shame. She was confused after Mother had talked her way with conviction and obsessive tenacity all the way around the circumference of an absence. Mother would say Abe was just stringing her along, he had dozens of women, she was just another gal—one burdened, moreover, with two brats. Within half an hour she'd convinced herself that he thought so much of her he was afraid of her. She was too cultured, too intelligent, too genteel, too dynamic for him. She frightened him.

I wasn't ashamed. I was coldly indifferent as my mind closed its locks and slowly flooded with dreams. I was a king or a god.

How my mother longed for that phone to ring. When my sister was old enough to date, she, too, waited by the phone. The negligence of men toward women struck me as past belief; how could these men resist so much longing?

All this waiting, of course, was a petri dish in which new cultures of speculation were breeding. Was he not calling to prove a point? His independence, perhaps? Men hated feeling trapped. His own desirability? Or had he found someone else? Or was he shy and himself waiting for a call? I half wanted to be a man, a grown-up man, but a gallant one who could finally put an end to all this suffering. My other half wanted to have a man; I thought I'd know better how to get one and keep him. Or else how to punish him for his neglect.

And all this speculation, I noticed, was occurring beside the obstinately mute telephone—brilliant, glittering black proof of the inefficacy of yearning. No thought, no architecture of thoughts no matter how intricate, could make that phone ring. Only beauty, youth, charm, money—only those things worked. The rest (goodness, worthiness, the conjuring of desire) was a pitiable substitute for the brute fact of glamour.

And then my mother would turn her hardworking, always shifting, tumbling scrutiny on me. She and I enjoyed a perfect communication, or so she said. I was a man far more mature than the riffraff she was dating. I was beautifully sensitive to the slightest shift in her moods. If I weren't her son, I'd be her best friend—or she'd marry me.

And yet (the wheels whirred faster and faster) without a man to emulate I was in danger of developing abnormally. I mustn't be a mama's boy, I mustn't become effeminate. I mustn't lean on her too much. That was the real reason she was so eager to remarry, to provide me with a suitable male role model. Children of broken homes were known to grow up wounded, their sexuality damaged. "Are you developing normally?" she asked when I was ten.

I told her something that astounded her, though I thought it would please her: "I don't want to go through puberty." I cited my sister. "She's already acting like a nut. I see myself standing on a hill above a lonesome valley I'll never be able to cross. I'll probably never be this calm again."

My sister, my mother and I—three unhappy people, and yet my mother's ceaseless optimism didn't even grant us the dignity of suffering. "Kids," she said, driving us away from school on a weekday, "we're going on vacation. Isn't that wonderful! We're off to Florida! Isn't that exciting?" In every way we had more fun than other people and were superior to them. At Christmastime Mother would count up her cards as though they were a precise numerical rendering of her worth; if someone neglected to send her a card, she'd worry about it, question herself, seem wounded—and then she'd dismiss the offender from her thoughts, even her life ("He wasn't much of a friend. I don't know why I hang around such crummy people").

My sister and I have been left alone in the hotel room all day. Mother is off on a date after work. We've been instructed to take our meals in the dining room downstairs ("I'll be home when I'm home—don't worry about me"). I'm ten, my sister is fourteen. She's interested in being a nurse. She has "sterilized" Mom's scissors and tweezers under hot tap water. Out of her allowance she's bought some gauze in a long roll. She convinces me to lie down and play sick. "You poor guy," she says in a sweet, unfamiliar voice, "just look at this burn!" She is the consoling, sympathetic nurse.

"Yeah, it really hurts. You see, I was boiling some water—"

"Sh-h-h!" she urges me. In real life she's always shutting me up; in the fiction of the hospital she's silencing me in the interest of my recovery. "You'll feel much better once I change your dressing. Please be quiet. I won't hurt you."

We're both bored. It's six on a December night and the sky outside the filmy hotel curtains (they smell of coal smoke) has long been dark. The phone hasn't rung all day— none of us is popular, that's evident. Not my sister, not me, not Mom. "Ouch!" I whine. "That bandage is too tight!"

"It's not!"

"It is so."