The Great Good Thing (4 page)

This one time he came in, I was playing on the yellow linoleum kitchen floor. My mother was standing at the sink washing dishes. I know how old I was because I was playing with a figure of the One-Eyed, One-Horned, Flyin' Purple People Eater, a character from a novelty song of the late 1950s. The song's producers had given the toy to my father in hopes he would promote the song on his show. My father had passed it along to me.

On his show that morning, my father had apparently done a Mr. Nat sketch that he thought was particularly clever. He asked my mother if she had heard it.

Over the water running into the sink, I heard Mom murmur softly, almost to herself, “I wish you wouldn't do that character.”

She did not say this angrily or harshly, not at all. She said it the way any affectionate wife might mention a basically
harmless husbandly habit that annoyed or embarrassed her. “I wish you wouldn't laugh so loudly when we're in a nice restaurant, dear.” But it immediately set off an alarm bell in attentive little me, which says something in itself. “Why not, Mommy? What's wrong with Mr. Nat? Why shouldn't Daddy do Mr. Nat?” No satisfactory explanation was forthcoming. But I think I suspected the truth even then.

It was because Mr. Nat was a Jew. Not just a Jew, a rambunctious, lower-class, Old-World Ashkenazi Jew. It was too close to her inner reality, too threatening to her aspirations. She wanted no stain of that sort of Jewish identity on her or on us.

I must have known that, sensed it, even as a child. I think it must have colored everything.

I
was an unhappy little boy and I escaped into daydreams.

In these dreams, I was a hero who rescued girls from danger. I was a cowboy about to step into a gunfight to save a widow's farm, or a soldier battling Nazis to reach the French mademoiselle in her cottage behind enemy lines. Sometimes I was like one of the superheroes from the comic books I loved. Elementary School Kid was just my secret identity. No one knew that I could become invisible, or shrink to the size of an atom, or breathe under water, or run at the speed of light. Or, best of all, that I could fly: fly anywhere and drop from the sky like heaven's vengeance—through the window, shattering glass—into the dark city alley where the henchmen lurked or anywhere else where girls were in danger and could be rescued in the nick of time.

There were other dreams, too, more personal, more specific dreams that weren't inspired by comic books or television
or movies but that grew organically out of my own childhood hurts and yearnings. I wanted to be a scientist, an inventor like my hero Thomas Edison. I had read every book in the school library about Edison. He had been thrashed by his father as I had been, humiliated and ridiculed by his father as I was now. And yet he had grown up to daydream the modern world into existence one gadget at a time—stock ticker, phonograph, movie camera—one idea after another going on in his head like a lightbulb (lightbulb!).

In my dreams, I invented . . . something. I could never really think of anything exciting to invent, even in my dreams, which probably should have served as a warning that I was going to have to find a different profession in real life. But in my dreams, I had invented something or other and had thus become the world's first famous Kid Scientist. A grateful nation awarded me my own astronomical observatory plus a special miniature car I could drive around town on my own. I was given my own house, too, in which I could live separate from my family with one of the girls I had a crush on in school or, better yet, a girl I imagined, a girl of my dreams.

I don't suppose these fantasies were much different in kind from the fantasies of other boys. We all played at being heroes: cowboys, soldiers, supermen, knights in armor, or a secret gang of good-guy thieves. In the acre and half-acre yards behind our plush and placid suburban houses, beneath the tall oaks and maples and hickories, and on the ridges of gently rolling hills, we acted out the courage of mighty men of valor, staging duels with sticks for swords, donning plastic
army helmets and toystore cowboy hats and dodging in and out among the tree trunks and bushes, shooting at each other with make-believe guns.

The sports we played were also a kind of heroic daydream. All spring long, in the hours between the end of school and twilight, on placid streets of quiet homes where cars passed only rarely, where girls jumped rope and played hopscotch on the sidewalks, while moms made dinner and kept an eye on us through the kitchen windows, we concocted a million variations of baseball. Fungo, stickball, Wiffle ball, catch—or just bouncing a tennis ball off the garage door. In the autumn, we played football, two-handed touch. Or sometimes, one of us would take his bike to the top of our street and ride down the hill no-handed, shouting, “It's Pile On time!” Six, eight, ten, or twelve boys would come running eagerly out of their houses to gather in the Klavan backyard. Someone would place a football on the grass in the center of the pack. And at the starting shout—“Pile on!”—we'd pile on, every man for himself, a brutal and uproarious scrum. The radio announcers in our heads described the action for the fans at home, and the crowds in our imaginations went wild.

We were heroes even in our quiet hours, playing board games that cast us as generals fighting for world domination or detectives solving murders or just masterminds locked in a raw battle of wits. I loved—still love—all kinds of games and puzzles. I was so good at checkers for a while that even my older brother had to turn over the board sometimes to keep me from winning. At night I would lie awake and imagine
games that would play automatically, machines that would fight whole battles for you while you worked the controls. If there had been video games when I was a child, I would have grown up without ever seeing the light of day.

Instead of video games, we had playsets: collections of figures and accessories. You moved them around with your hands while whispering dialogue and sound effects under your breath. There were Civil War playsets with the soldiers colored blue and gray; Revolutionary War sets with the British red from head to toe; and Fort Apache, in which the US Cavalry, all blue, fought off the Injuns, all brown. I even had an
Untouchables
set in which federal agents traded bullets with scar-faced gangsters on the rooftops of a toy Chicago.
Rat-ta-tat-tat.
The plastic gangsters, still clutching the tommy guns molded into their arms, would somersault, screaming to their bloody deaths on the pavement below.

It was all a kind of dreaming, a way to bring some sense of hazard and nobility into our grassy, safe, and well-looked-after world. Boys are born yearning for battle and adventure. And our fathers' lives had given that longing a shape and a name: the shape and name of war. Our dads had fought in World War II. My own dad had been stationed at an airfield on the island of Guam in the Pacific. He told us stories. About how he'd seen the semiliquid remains of fliers scraped out of cockpits with a shovel. About how he'd heard snipers in the jungle at night. About how he sank in mud up to his backside out there.

A lot of our dads told such stories. And we could see their adventures for ourselves in old movies on TV and sometimes
even in new movies in the theaters.
Sands of Iwo Jima. Merrill's Marauders. The Longest Day.
It was all very cool and very frightening. We asked our mothers: Would we have to go to a war when we grew up? And we wondered to ourselves: Would we rise to the occasion? Would we be heroes like our fathers were? Or would we fail the test, and fall prey to the fears we felt deep down even as we played at being brave?

Our mothers assured us there would be no more armies when we grew up, and no more wars. But we weren't convinced. We knew the Russians were out there, bad guys who did not believe in freedom and wanted to take over the world. Sometimes at school we had air-raid drills in which we practiced hiding under our desks so we'd be ready in case the Reds dropped the atom bomb on us. Our schoolhouse was a one-story, gray-clapboard building on the crest of a hill of grass. The southern wall of my classroom had a line of windows looking out on the tree-shaded street below. The school principal warned us that if an atom bomb struck, the window glass would shatter and shards would go flying. I imagined I would have to crawl on my belly like an infantryman to avoid being cut to pieces by the glittering barrage as I rescued the girls.

We were boys in a place of safety in a world of danger and we dreamed.

But if my dreams were no different in kind than the dreams of other boys, they were different in degree. I dreamed without ceasing, obsessively. I had a rule that my dreams had to make sense. That is, the stories in them needed to be held together by some sort of internal logic. It wasn't that my fantasies had
to be realistic. I could fly in them; I could drive around town in a child-sized car; I could suddenly be a cowboy—all that was okay. But there had to be a narrative built into the daydream explaining how such things could have come to be; a backstory, as they call it in the movie business nowadays.

Could I fly because I came from another planet, or had some special potion done the trick? Had the grown-ups met to rewrite the laws in order to allow a child prodigy such as myself to own a car? Was I a cowboy because I had been born in an alternative universe, or had I traveled back in time from the modern world? I labored at these explanations diligently, even when it became a tiresome chore. I was not satisfied until my fantasies
worked
. Only then would they become part of my library of dreams.

I shaped and reshaped these dreams whenever I was alone, and sometimes—more and more often as the years went by—I sought out solitude so I could go on dreaming. If you had asked me why I dreamed so much, what reality I was escaping from, I don't think I would have been able to tell you. I thought I lived a happy life. I thought my family was the best family ever. My father's bristling anger and the way he ridiculed me, my mother's weird dissociation, the sadistic violence that sometimes erupted among my three brothers and me were all enacted within a context of genuine affection and suburban normalcy. I did not see that they were there. I did not know they were making me unhappy. But more and more, I daydreamed to escape them, and then even more and more.

My walk to school in the morning was my favorite time to
drift into fantasy. It was a journey of maybe a third of a mile, a fifteen-minute walk for a six-, seven-, or eight-year-old child.

We lived in the last house but one on Old Colony Lane. It was a hill on which the houses got smaller and smaller as you came down. There were porticoed white mansions perched up at the top. Then, mid-slope, there were fine, stately homes. By the time you got down to the bottom where we were, the living was relatively modest. Our own house grew larger over time as my father prospered and added rooms and bought the neighbor's backyard to add to ours. But at the start, it was just a smallish colonial, white clapboards and green shutters, with a narrow front lawn.

It was only a minute's walk from my front door to the end of the road. From there you could either turn right onto the wide, bright, open path of Chadwick Road, or go straight ahead. Ahead lay the junction of Andover and Plymouth. It was a strangely dark corner. An empty house hunkered in mossy shadows under a dense cluster of oaks and pines. We made a haunted mansion out of it, of course. My big brother and his friends hung hangmen's nooses from the tree branches to frighten us. They cut out cardboard hands and streaked them with blood-red marker and stuck them in the earth so it looked as if dead men were digging out of their graves.
¹

But while going by the ghost house did send a chill through me, I opted for that route most often. There were fewer kids along the way. If I left home five minutes early, I could avoid running into my pal from up the block. Then I could walk to school alone, and I could dream uninterrupted.

Books tucked under my arm, I ambled along the morning streets imagining stories, lost in stories. It was not an empty state of mind. It was a positive pleasure, like going to the movies or watching TV. I looked forward to it. I enjoyed it. I still remember the melancholy that would come over me as the little gray schoolhouse came into sight and the end of the walk drew near. I was sorry that my best time for dreaming was almost over.

Not that school put an end to my dreaming. No, no, I dreamed all through it. I was a terrible student. I managed to get top grades in every subject except handwriting (mine was then, as it is now, illegible), but it was all fraud. I could read well and write well and talk glibly and even figure out math problems in my head. So I could bluff my way through subjects I knew nothing about, and neither my teachers nor my parents, nor even my friends, were aware that I was hardly doing any schoolwork at all. I would come home every afternoon and dump my books on the table in the front hall. I would tell my mother I had finished my homework at lunchtime or in study period. Then, after a snack of cookies and milk, I would rush out of the house again, jump on my bike, and pedal off in search of other kids to play with. I learned nothing. I knew nothing: no historical facts, no mathematical formulas, no passages from the books we were supposed to have read.

As a result, my time in the classroom was divided between boredom and terror. I would sit dazed in a fog of immovable minutes and hours. With some lesson or other droning on in the background, I would doodle jets and monsters in my
notebook. I'd imagine Russian soldiers kicking in the door and how I'd fight my way through rifle fire to rescue the fascinatingly pale girl who sat in the front row where she was forever eagerly raising her hand. Then, every now and again, the fog would suddenly be split by a blue-electric flash of fear. The teacher had asked a question! Now she was scanning the children's faces, face by face, searching for someone to call on. It was an easy question too. Anyone who had even glanced at the reading would know the answer. But I had not, and I did not.

The suspense was agony. The fear of public humiliation—dreadful: the fear that my charade would be undone, my ignorance exposed for all the world to see. All my dreams of epic heroism would evaporate on the instant and I would be forced to stutter and sweat through some mealy-mouthed excuse that everyone would know was a lie. I waited, breathless, for the teacher to decide.

In the event, the catastrophe rarely struck. I generally made such a convincing show of being smart that it never occurred to my teachers what an ignoramus I really was; it never occurred to them to test me. The axe almost always fell on some other poor shnook with lower grades and a worse reputation. From him who has not, even what he has shall be taken away.

But though one unbearable moment of suspense might have passed, I knew there'd be another one coming and soon. As I grew in ignorance, my fear of exposure began to haunt even my off-hours. Increasingly, my afternoons and nights and weekends became poisoned with a pervasive nausea of
anxiety. I soothed myself with daydreaming and play, so that I neglected my homework even more and had to worry even more about being found out.

Dreams and anxiety: they fed on each other. The dreams—my heroism and courage and genius in the dreams—created an image of myself that I felt I had to live up to, or try to live up to, or appear to live up to at least. I couldn't stand the idea of being exposed as weak or cowardly or stupid. It was strange really, when you think about it. In some ways, I was such a little conman. But at the same time I seemed to be nurturing the first small glimmerings of what might one day become a sense of integrity. I wanted to be what I pretended to be. I wanted to be what I dreamed.