Theophilus North (33 page)

He thought a minute and replied, “Seeing faces.”

“Not reading?”

“There are substitutes for reading; there are no substitutes for not seeing faces.”

“Damn it, Mino! Your mother was right. It's too bad about your feet, but you're certainly all right in the upper story.”

Now, reader, I know what he wanted to talk about, you know what he most wanted to talk about (at two dollars an hour), and I suspect that his mother knew what he most wanted to talk about—there had been a certain emphasis in her report of his complaint that the boys and men he knew did not talk to him “natural.” By what appears to be a coincidence (but the older I grow, the less surprised I am by what are called coincidences) I came to this interview with Mino prepared—armed—with a certain amount of experience acquired five years previously.

The following recall of this experience in 1921 is no idle digression:

When I was discharged from the Army (having defended, unopposed, this very same Narragansett Bay) I returned to continue my education; then I got a job teaching at the Raritan School in New Jersey. In those days at no great distance from the school there was a veterans' hospital for amputees and paraplegics. The hospital had a hard-worked staff of nurses and recreation directors. Ladies in the neighboring towns volunteered their services in the latter department—and stout-hearted ladies they were, for it is no easy thing to enter suddenly into a world of four hundred men, most of whom have lost one or more limbs. They played checkers and chess with the men; they gave lessons in the mandolin and guitar; they organized classes in watercolor painting, public speaking, amateur theatricals, and glee club singing. But the volunteer workers fell all too short. Those four hundred men had nothing to do for fifteen hours a day but to play cards, torment the nurses, and to conceal from one another their dread of the future that lay before them. Moreover there were few male volunteers; American men were back at home from war, hard at work, picking up their interrupted lives. And naturally no man would willingly enter that jungle of frantic wounded men unless he had himself been a soldier. So the superintendent of the hospital sent out word to the headmasters of the private schools in the nearby counties asking for ex-military volunteers to assist the recreation director. Transportation would be provided. A number of us from the Raritan School (including T. T. North, corporal, Coast Artillery, retired) piled into a weapons-carrier and rattled off thirty miles to the hospital on Monday mornings and Friday afternoons.

“Gentlemen,” said the recreation director, “a lot of these fellows think they want to learn journalism. They think they can earn a million dollars by selling their war experiences to the
Saturday Evening Post
. Some don't want to think about the War; they want to write and sell Wild West stories or cops-and-robbers stories. Most of them never got out of high school. They can't write a laundry list. . . . I'm dividing you volunteers into sections. Each of you has twelve men. They've signed up eagerly; you don't have to worry about that. Your classes are called Journalism and Writing for Money! They're eager enough, but let me prepare you for one thing: their attention gets tired easily. Arrange so that every fifteen minutes
they
have a chance to talk. Most of them are real nice fellows: you won't have any trouble with discipline. But they're haunted by fear of the future. If you finally get their confidence you'll get an earful. Now I'm going to talk frankly to you men: they think they can never get a girl to marry them; they're afraid they can't even get a whore to sleep with them. They think most of the outside world looks on them as sort of eunuchs. Most of them aren't, of course, but one of the effects of amputation is the fancy that they've been castrated. In one ward or another every night someone wakes up screaming in a nightmare
about that
. All they think about, really, is sex, sex, sex—and just as desperately: the prospect of being dependent all their lives on others. So every fifteen minutes take a conversation-break. Your real contribution here is to let them blow off steam. One more word: all day and most of the night they use foul language to one another—New York smut, Kentucky smut, Oklahoma smut, California smut. That's understandable, isn't it? We have a rule here; if they talk like that within the hearing of the nurses or the padres or you volunteers, they're penalized. They get their cigarette allowance cut or they can't get their daily swim in the pool or they can't go to the movie show. I wish you'd cooperate with us in this matter. You'll get their respect by being severe with them, not easy. Give them an assignment. Tell them you want an article or a story or a poem from each one of them when you return a week from today. Miss Warriner will now lead you to your tables in the gym. Thank you, gentlemen, for coming.”

“Mino, I think it's great the way you struck out for yourself and are on the way to making yourself self-supporting—first solving the puzzles and then inventing new ones. Tell me how that happened?”

“I began doing them when I was about twelve. Schoolwork wasn't very hard so I used to read a lot. Rosa would bring me books from the library.”

“What kind of books then?”

“I thought then that I'd be an astronomer, but I began that too early. I wasn't ready for the mathematics. I am now. Later I wanted to be a priest. Of course I couldn't, but I read a lot of theology and philosophy. I didn't understand all of it, but . . . that's when I learned a lot of Latin.”

“Couldn't you find anyone to talk those things over with?”

“I like to figure things out by myself.”

“Hell, you wanted to read Dante with me.”

He blushed and murmured, “That's different . . . then I began doing puzzles to make money to buy books.”

“Show me some puzzles that you've been making.”

Most of the shelves within reach of his hand were like those in a linen closet. He drew out a sheaf of leaves; the puzzles were written with India ink on art paper.
“Opus elegantissimum, juvenis!”
I said. “Do you get a lot of pleasure out of this?”

“No. I get pleasure out of the money.”

I lowered my voice. “I remember my first paycheck. It was like a kick in the pants. It's the beginning of manhood. Your mother told me you were inventing some new things.”

“I have designs for three new games for adults. Do you know Mr. Aldeburg?”

“No.”

“He's a lawyer in town. He's helping me take out patents for them. The whole field of puzzles and games is full of crooks. They're crazy for new ideas and they'd steal anything.”

I leaned back. “Mino, what are the three most important things you want to do when the real money starts coming in?”

He reached toward another shelf and brought out a manufacturer's catalogue—hospital equipment, wheelchairs for invalids. He opened it and held a page toward me: a rolling chair, propelled by a motor, nickel-plated, with a detachable awning for protection against rain, snow, or sun—a beauty. Two hundred and seventy-five dollars.

I whistled. “And after that?”

Another catalogue. “I get fitted for some boots. They're attached to my legs above and below the knee by a lot of straps. I'd still have to use crutches, but my feet wouldn't swing. Through my legs I could put some of my weight on the ground. But I'd have to use some kind of cane to prevent my falling on my face. I think I could invent something after I'd got used to the boots.”

Such was his mature control that he might have been talking about buying a car. But there was one element of confidence still lacking. I went right to the point. “And after that you want to rent your own apartment?”

“Yes,” he said surprised.

“Where you can entertain your friends?”

“Yes,” he said and looked at me sharply to see if I had guessed what was in his mind. I smiled and repeated my question, holding his glance. The courage ebbed out of him and his eyes fell away.

“Can I look over your books, Mino?”

“Sure.”

I rose and turned to the shelves behind me. The books were all second-hand and appeared to have suffered long use—longer than his life. If he had bought them in Newport he must have ransacked the same second-hand stores that I had come to know when I was “excavating” the Fifth City. Maybe he had ordered them from the catalogues of such dealers in the larger cities. On the bottom shelf were the
Britannica
(eleventh), some atlases, star charts, and other large works of reference. The majority of the shelves were filled with works on astronomy and mathematics. I took down Newton's
Principia
. The margins were covered with notes in fine handwriting and in faded ink.

“Are these notes yours?”

“No, but they're very sharp.”

“Where's your
Divina Commedia?
”

He pointed to two shelves within his reach: the
Summa
, Spinoza, the
Aeneid
, the
Pensées
of Pascal, Descartes . . .

“You read French?”

“Rosa's crazy about French. We play chess and go and parcheesi in French.”

I had been thinking of Elbert Hughes. So there was another half-genius in Newport; maybe a genius. Maybe a late blooming of the Fifth City. I remembered having heard that in Concord, Massachusetts, almost a century before, groups used to devote an evening to reading aloud in Italian or Greek or German, or even in Sanskrit. In Berkeley, California, my mother used to read Italian aloud with Mrs. Day on one evening in the week and French with Mrs. Vincent on another. She attended German classes at the University (Professor Pinger), because we, her children, had learned some German in two successive German schools in China.

It was on the tip of my tongue to ask Mino if he had any wish to go to either of the two universities nearby. I saw that his rigorous independence not only forbade his relying on others to help him move about from place to place, but that his deprivation had shaped his mind toward becoming an autodidact. (“I like to figure things out by myself.”) I remembered how the father of Pascal had come upon the young boy reading with delight the First Book of Euclid. The father had other plans for his son's education. He took away the volume, scarcely begun, and shut the boy in his room; but Pascal wrote the rest of the book himself, deducing the properties of the rectangle and the triangle, as a silkworm produces silk from his own entrails. But in the case of Mino I was saddened. In the twentieth century it is not possible to advance far as an autodidact in the vast fields of his interests. I had already known such solitary men—and in later years discovered others—who, having early repudiated formal education, were writing a
History of the Human Intelligence
or
The Sources of Moral Values
.

I sat down again. “Mino, have you seen any girls you like lately?”

He looked at me as though I'd struck him or ridiculed him. I continued looking at him and waited.

“No . . . I don't know any girls.”

“Oh, yes you do! Your sister brings some of her friends here to see you.” He couldn't or didn't deny it. “Didn't I see you talking to one of those assistant librarians in the magazine room at the People's Library?” He couldn't or didn't deny it.

At last he said, “They don't take me seriously.”

“What do you mean, they don't take you seriously?”

“They talk for a minute, but they're in a hurry to get away.”

“God damn it, what do you want them to do: start taking their clothes off?”

His hands were trembling. He put them under his buttocks and continued to stare at me. “No.”

“You think they don't talk naturally to you. I'll bet you don't talk naturally to them. A fine-looking young man like you, with top-quality first-rate brains. I'll bet you play your cards wrong.” There was a breathless silence. His panic was contagious, but I plunged on. “Sure, you have a handicap, but the handicap isn't as bad as you think it is. You build it up in your imagination. Be yourself, Mino! Lots of men with a handicap as bad as yours have settled down and got married and had kids. Do you want to know how I know this
personally?
”

“Yes.”

I told him about the veterans' hospital. I ended up almost shouting, “Four hundred men in wheelchairs and wagons. And some of them still send me letters and cards. With photographs of their family—their own
new
family around them. Especially on Christmas cards. I haven't got any of them in Newport, but I'll send home for some to show you. But, Mino, understand this: they're older than you. Most of them were older than you when they were wounded. What the hell are you so impatient about? The trouble with you is that you're building up an anxiety about the years ahead; you've got 1936 and 1946 planted in your head as though they were tomorrow. And the other trouble with you is that you want the Big Passionate Bonfire right now. A man can't live without female companionship, you're damn right about that. But don't spoil it, don't ruin it by building up a lot of steam too early. Begin with friendship. Now listen: the Misses Laughlins' Scottish Tea Room is just eight doors from your father's door. Have you ever eaten there?” He shook his head. “Well, you're going to, you and Rosa. I'm inviting you and
some girl you know
to lunch with me next Saturday noon.”

“I don't know any girl
well enough
to ask.”

“Well, if you don't bring a girl to lunch on Saturday, I'll clam up on the whole matter. It'll always be a pleasure to me to come and call on you and talk about Sir Isaac Newton and Bishop Berkeley—I'm very sorry to see that you haven't got any of his works on your shelves—but I'll never open my damn mouth on the subject of girls again. We'll just pretend we're eunuchs. My idea was that you ask one girl this Saturday with the three of us—just to break the ice—and that the following Saturday you ask
another
girl, all by yourself. I guess you can afford it, can't you? They serve a very good seventy-five-cent blue-plate lunch. You were ready to throw away sixteen dollars on some lousy Dante lessons with me.—Then the following Saturday I'll give another party and you bring still a different girl.”