American Childhood (12 page)

Opposition emboldened Mother, and she would take on anybody on any issue—the chairman of the board, at a cocktail party, on the current strike; she would fly at him in a flurry of passion, as a songbird selflessly attacks a big hawk.

“Eisenhower’s going to win,” I announced after school. She lowered her magazine and looked me in the eyes: “How do you know?” I was doomed. It was fatal to say, “Everyone says so.” We all knew well what happened. “Do you consult this Everyone before you make your decisions? What if Everyone decided to round up all the Jews?” Mother knew there was no danger of cowing me. She simply tried to keep us all awake. And in fact it was always clear to Amy and me, and to Molly when she grew old enough to listen, that if our classmates came to cruelty, just as much as if the neighborhood or the nation came to madness, we were expected to take, and would be each separately capable of taking, a stand.

T
HE FRENCH AND INDIAN WAR
was a war of which I, for one, reading stretched out in the bedroom, couldn’t get enough. The names of the places were a litany: Fort Ticonderoga on the Hudson, Fort Vincennes on the Wabash. The names of the people were a litany: the Sieur de Contrecoeur; the Marquis de Montcalm; Major Robert Rogers of the Rangers; the Seneca Chief Half-King.

How witless in comparison were the clumsy wars of Europe: on this open field at nine o’clock sharp, soldiers in heavy armor, dragged from their turnip patches in feudal obedience to Lord So-and-So, met in long ranks the heavily armored men owned or paid for by Lord So-and-So, and defeated them by knocking them over like ninepins. What was at stake? A son’s ambition, or an earl’s pride.

In the French and Indian War, and the Indian wars, a whole continent was at stake, and it was hard to know who to root for as I read. The Indians were the sentimental favorites, but they were visibly cruel. The French excelled at Indian skills and had the endearing habit of singing in boats. But if they won, we would all speak French, which seemed affected in the woods. The Scotch-Irish settlers and the English army were very uneasy allies, but their cruelties were invisible to me, and their partisans wrote all the books that fell into my hands.

It all seemed to take place right here, here among the blossoming rhododendrons outside the sunporch windows just below our bedroom, here in the Pittsburgh forest that rose again from every vacant lot, every corner of every yard the mower missed, every dusty crack in the sidewalk, every
clogged gutter on the roof—an oak tree, a sycamore, a mountain ash, a pine.

For here, on the tip of the point where the three rivers met, the French built Fort Duquesne. It linked French holdings on the Great Lakes to their settlement at New Orleans. It was 1754; the forest was a wilderness. From Fort Duquesne the French set their Indian allies to raiding far-flung English-speaking settlements and homesteads. The Indians burned the farms and tortured many farm families. From Fort Duquesne the French marched out and defeated George Washington at nearby Fort Necessity. From Fort Duquesne the French marched out and defeated General Edward Braddock: Indian warriors shot from cover, which offended those British soldiers who had time to notice before they died. It was here in 1758 that General John Forbes established British hegemony over the Mississippi watershed, by driving the French from the point and building Fort Pitt.

Here our own doughty provincials in green hunting shirts fought beside regiments of rangers in buckskins, actual Highlanders in kilts, pro-English Iroquois in warpaint, and British regulars in red jackets. They came marching vividly through the virgin Pittsburgh forest; they trundled up and down the nearby mountain ridges by day and slept at night on their weapons under trees. Pioneer scouts ran ahead of them and behind them; messengers snuck into their few palisaded forts, where periwigged English officers sat and rubbed their foreheads while naked Indians in the treetops outside were setting arrows on fire to burn down the roof.

Best, it was all imaginary. That the French and Indian War took place in this neck of the woods merely enhanced its storied quality, as if that fact had been a particularly pleasing literary touch. This war was part of my own private consciousness, the dreamlike interior murmur of books.

Costumed enormous people, transparent, vivid, and bold as decals, as tall and rippling as people in dreams, shot at each other up and down the primeval woods, race against race. Just as people in myths travel rigidly up to the sky, or are placed there by some great god’s fingers, to hold still forever in the midst of their loving or battles as fixed con
stellations of stars, so the fighting cast of the French and Indian War moved in a colorful body—locked into position in the landscape but still loading muskets or cowering behind the log door or landing canoes on a muddy shore—into books. They were fabulous and morally neutral, like everything in history, like everything in books. They were imagination’s playthings: toy soldiers, toy settlers, toy Indians. They were a part of the interior life; they were private; they were my own.

In books these wars played themselves out ceaselessly; the red-warpainted Indian tomahawked the settler woman in calico, and the rangy settler in buckskin spied out the Frenchman in military braid. Whenever I opened the book, the war struck up again, like a record whose music sounded when the needle hit. The skirling of Highlanders’ bagpipes came playing again, high and thin over the dry oak ridges. The towheaded pioneer schoolchildren were just blabbing their memorized psalms when from right outside the greased parchment window sounded the wild and fatal whoops of Indian warriors on a raid.

The wild and fatal whoops, the war whoops of the warriors, the red warriors whooping on a raid. It was a delirium. The tongue diddled the brain. Private life, book life, took place where words met imagination without passing through world.

I could dream it all whenever I wanted—and how often I wanted to dream it! Fiercely addicted, I dosed myself again and again with the drug of the dream.

Parents have no idea what the children are up to in their bedrooms: They are reading the same paragraphs over and over in a stupor of violent bloodshed. Their legs are limp with horror. They are reading the same paragraphs over and over, dizzy with gratification as the young lovers find each other in the French fort, as the boy avenges his father, as the sound of muskets in the woods signals the end of the siege. They could not move if the house caught fire. They hate the actual world. The actual world is a kind of tedious plane where dwells, and goes to school, the body, the boring body which houses the eyes to read the books and houses the heart
the books enflame. The very boring body seems to require an inordinately big, very boring world to keep it up, a world where you have to spend far too much time, have to
do
time like a prisoner, always looking for a chance to slip away, to escape back home to books, or escape back home to any concentration—fanciful, mental, or physical—where you can lose your self at last. Although I was hungry all the time, I could not bear to hold still and eat; it was too dull a thing to do, and had no appeal either to courage or to imagination. The blinding sway of their inner lives makes children immoral. They find things good insofar as they are thrilling, insofar as they render them ever more feverish and breathless, ever more limp and senseless on the bed.

Throughout these long, wonderful wars, I saw Indian braves behind every tree and parked car. They slunk around, fairly bursting with woodcraft. They led soldiers on miraculous escapes through deep woods and across lakes at night; they paddled their clever canoes noiselessly; they swam underwater without leaving bubbles; they called to each other like owls. They nocked their arrows silently on the brow of the hill and snuck up in their soft moccasins to the camp where the enemy lay sleeping under heavy guard. They shrieked, drew their osage bows, and never missed—all the while communing deeply with birds and deer.

I had been born too late. I would have made a dandy scout, although I was hungry all the time, because I had taught myself, with my friend Pin, to walk in the woods silently: without snapping a twig, which was easy, or stepping on a loud leaf, which was hard. Experience taught me a special, rolling walk for skulking in silence: you step down with your weight on the ball of your foot, and ease it to your heel.

The Indians who captured me would not torture me, but would exclaim at my many abilities, and teach me more, all the while feeding me handsomely. Soon I would talk to animals, become invisible, ride a horse naked and shrieking, shoot things.

I practiced traveling through the woods in Frick Park without leaving footprints. I practiced tracking people and animals, such as the infamous pedigreed dachshunds, by following sign. I knew the mark of Walter Milligan’s blunt heel and the mark of Amy’s sharp one. I practiced sneaking up on Mother as she repotted a philodendron, Father as he washed the car, saying, as I hoped but doubted the Indians said, “Boo.”

A
T SCHOOL
we memorized a poem:

Richland Lane was untrafficked, hushed, planted in great shade trees, and peopled by wonderfully collected children. They were sober, sane, quiet kids, whose older brothers and sisters were away at boarding school or college. Every warm night we played organized games—games that were the sweetest part of those sweet years, that long suspended interval between terror and anger.

On the quiet dead-end side street, among the still brick houses under their old ash trees and oaks, we paced out the ritual evenings. I saw us as if from above, even then, even as I stood in place living out my childhood and knowing it, aware of myself as if from above and behind, skinny and exultant on the street. We are silent, waiting or running, spread out on the pale street like chessmen, stilled as priests, relaxed and knowing. Someone hits the ball, someone silent far up the street catches it on the bounce; we move aside, clearing a path. Carefully the batter lays down the bat perpendicular to the street. Carefully the hushed player up the street rolls the ball down to the bat. The rolled ball hits the bat and flies up unpredictably; the batter misses his catch; he and the fielder switch positions. Indian Ball.

Capture the Flag was, essentially, the French and Indian War. The dead-end street (Europe) saw open combat at its fixed border. Brute strength could win. We disdained the street, although of course we had to guard its border. We fought the real war in the backyards (America)—a limitless wilderness of trees, garbage cans, thickets, back porches, and gardens, where no one knew where the two sides’ territories ended, and where strategy required bold and original planning, private initiative, sneaky scouting, and courage.

If someone cheated at any game, or incurred the group’s wrath in any way, the rest of us gave him, or her, Indian burns: we wrung a bare arm with both hands close together till the skin chafed. Worse—reserved for practically capital crimes—was the dreaded but admired typewriter torture, which we understood to be, in modern guise, an old Indian persuader. One of us straddled the offender, bared his or her breastbone, and lightly tapped fingertips there—very lightly, just where the skin covers the bone most closely. This light tapping does not hurt at all for the first five minutes or so.

We were nice kids who rarely resorted to torture. We played Red Rover, a variation on Prisoners’ Base called Beckons Wanted, and Crack the Whip. Everything else, and parts of these games, too, smacked of Indians. By day, Pin Ford and I played at being Indians straight out. Her parents were also young, and she was my age, an only child; they lived two doors up. Pin’s real name was Barbara. She was tan and blond, sturdy, smooth of skin; she was agreeable and quick to laugh. Her courage and her flair for the visual arts hadn’t yet formed. She was content now to stalk the neighborhood and knock over the odd streetcar.

As Indians, Pin and I explored the wooded grounds of the Presbyterian seminary at our backyards. We made bows and arrows: we peeled and straightened deadfall sticks for arrows, and cut, stealthily, green boughs to bend for bows. With string we rigged our mothers’ Chesterfield cigarette cartons over our shoulders as quivers. We shot our bows. We
threw knives at targets, and played knife-throwing games. We walked as the Indians had walked, stirring no leaves, snapping no twigs. We built an Indian village, Navajo style, under the seminary’s low copper beech: we baked clay bricks on slate roofing tiles set on adobe walls around a twiggy fire.

We named the trees. We searched the sky for omens, and inspected the ground for sign.

We came home and found our mothers together in our side yard by the rose garden, tanning on chaises longues. They were both thin and blond. They held silvered cardboard reflectors up to their flung-back chins. Over their closed eyelids they had placed blue eye-shaped plastic cups, joined over the nose.

T
HE ATTIC BEDROOM
where I drew my baseball mitt was a crow’s nest, a treehouse, a studio, an office, a forensic laboratory, and a fort. It interested me especially for a totemic brown water stain on a sloping plaster wall. The stain looked like a square-rigged ship heeled over in a storm. I examined this ship for many months. It was a painting, not a drawing; it had no lines, only forms awash, which rose faintly from the plaster and deepened slowly and dramatically as I watched and the seas climbed and the wind rose before anyone could furl the sails. Those distant dashes over the water—were they men sliding overboard? Were they storm petrels flying? I knew a song whose chorus asked, What did the deep sea say?

My detective work centered around the attic, and sometimes included Pin Ford. We filed information on criminal suspects in a shoe box. We got the information by hanging around the Evergreen Café on Penn Avenue and noting suspicious activity.

One dark, rainy afternoon when I was alone, I saw a case of beer inside the trunk of a man’s car. If that wasn’t suspicious, I didn’t know what was. I was lurking just outside the drugstore, where I could see the Evergreen Café clientele without being seen. I memorized the car license number, of course, as anyone would—but my real virtue as a detective was that I could memorize the whole man, inch by inch, by means of sentences, and later reproduce the man in a drawing.

When I came home from the dark rain that afternoon I walked through floor after floor of the lighted house, wetting
the golden rugs and muttering, until I got to the attic stairs and the attic itself. There I repaired to a card table under the square-rigged ship. I wrote down the suspect’s car’s make and license number. I wrote down my stabs at his height and age, and a description of his clothes. Then I turned on the radio, opened a cheap drawing tablet, and relaxed to the business of drawing the man who had stepped out of the Evergreen Café and revealed a case of beer in the trunk of his car.

By accident I drew a sloppy oval that looked like his head. I copied a page of these. Paying attention, I marked off some rough ratios: the crucial intervals between eye sockets, headtop, and chin. Unconsciously again, I let my hand scribble lines for features. I sat up to play back in my head certain memorized sentences: he has a wide mouth; his mouth corners fall directly beneath eyes’ outer corners; forehead is round; ears are high, triangular. My dumb hand molded the recurved facial masses and shaded the eye sockets for its own pleasure with slanting parallel lines. I sat enchanted and unwitting in a trance.

The radio woman enunciated her slow, terrible song. She sounded her notes delicately, as did the idiot xylophone that preceded her. A wind was rising outside. Across the attic room, the blackened windows rattled. I saw their glossed reflections on the pale walls wag. The rain battered the roof over my head, over the waterlogged ship. I heard the bare buckeye boughs hitting the house.

I was drawing the head. I shut my eyes. I could not see the man’s face eidetically. That is, I could not reproduce it interiorly, study it, and discover new things, as some few people can look at a page, print it, as it were, in their memories, and read it off later. I could produce stable images only rarely. But like anyone, I could recall and almost see fleet torn fragments of a scene: a raincoat sleeve’s wrinkling, a blond head bending, red-lighted rain falling on asphalt, a pesteringly interesting pattern in a cordovan shoe, which rises
and floats across that face I want to see. I perceived these sights as scraps that floated like blowing tissue across some hollow interior space, some space at the arching roof of the rib cage, perhaps. I swerved to study them before they slid away.

I hoped that the sentences would nail the blowing scraps down. I hoped that the sentences would store scenes like rolls of film, rolls of film I could simply reel off and watch. But of course, the sentences did not work that way. The sentences suggested scenes to the imagination, which were no sooner repeated than envisioned, and envisioned just as poorly and just as vividly as actual memories. Here was Raggedy Ann, say, an actual memory, with her red-and-white-striped stockings and blunt black feet. And here, say, was a barefoot boy asleep in a car, his cheeks covered thinly with blood. Which was real? The barefoot boy was just as vivid. It was easier to remember a sentence than a sight, and the sentences suggested sights new or skewed. These were dim regions, these submerged caves where waters mingled. On my cheap tablet I was drawing round lips, suns, fish in schools.

Soon someone would call me for dinner. But I would not come, I suddenly realized, and I would not answer the call—ever—for I would have died of starvation. They would find me, having slid off my chair, half under the card table, lying dead on the floor. And so young.

In the blue shoe box on the card table they would find my priceless files. I had written all my data about today’s suspect, drawn his face several times from several angles, and filed it all under his car’s license number. When the police needed it, it was ready.

Privately I thought the reference librarian at the Homewood Library was soft in the head. The week before, she had handed me, in broad daylight, the book that contained the key to Morse code. Without a word, she watched me copy it, pocket the paper, and leave.

I knew how to keep a code secret, if she didn’t. At home I memorized Morse code promptly, and burned the paper.

I had read the library’s collection of popular forensic
medicine, its many books about Scotland Yard and the FBI, a dull biography of J. Edgar Hoover, and its Sherlock Holmes. I knew I was not alone in knowing Morse code. The FBI knew it, Scotland Yard knew it, and every sparks in the navy knew it. I read everything I could get about ham radios. All I needed was a receiver. I could listen in on troop maneuvers, intelligence reports, and disasters at sea. And I could rescue other hams from calamity, to which, as a class, they seemed remarkably prone.

I knew that police artists made composite drawings of criminal suspects. Witnesses to crimes selected, from a varied assortment, a stripe of crown hair, a stripe or two of forehead, a stripe of eyes, and so forth. Police artists—of whose ranks I was an oblate—made a drawing that combined these elements; newspapers published the drawings; someone recognized the suspect and called the police.

When Pin Ford and I were running low on suspects, and had run out of things to communicate in Morse code, I sat at my attic table beside the shoe box file and drew a variety of such stripes. I amused myself by combining them into new faces. So God must sit in heaven, at a card table, fingering a heap of stripes—hairlines, jawlines, brows—and joining them at whim to people a world. I began wondering if the stock of individual faces on earth through all of time is infinite.

My sweetest ambition was to see a drawing of mine on a newspaper’s front page:
HAS ANYBODY SEEN THIS MAN
? I didn’t care about reducing crime, any more than Sherlock Holmes did. I rather wished there were more crime, and closer by. What interested me was the schematic likeness, how recognizable it was, and how startlingly few things you needed to strike a resemblance. You needed only a few major proportions in the head. The soft tissues scarcely mattered; they were merely decorations that children drew. What mattered was the framing of the skull.

And so in that faraway attic, among the boughs of buckeye trees, year after year, I drew. I drew formal, sustained studies of my left hand still on the card table, of my
baseball mitt, a saddle shoe. I drew from memory the faces of the people I knew, my own family just downstairs in the great house—oh, but I hated these clumsy drawings, these beloved faces so rigid on the page and lacking in tenderness and irony. (Who could analyze a numb skull when all you cared about was a lively caught glance, the pleased rising of Mother’s cheek, the soft amused setting of Amy’s lip, Father’s imagining eye in its socket?) And I drew from memory the faces of people I saw in the streets. I formed sentences about them as I looked at them, and repeated the sentences to myself as I wandered on.

I wanted to notice everything, as Holmes had, and remember it all, as no one had before. Noticing and remembering were the route to Scotland Yard, where I intended to find my niche. They were also, more urgently, the route to the corner yard on Edgerton Avenue, to life in the house we had left and lost.

Hadn’t I already forgotten the floor plan of that house where I had lived for seven years? I could see a terrifying oblong of light bend across a room’s corner; I could see my mother talking on the phone in the dark stairwell, and Jo Ann Sheehy skating at night on the iced street, and the broom-closet door opening to reveal—the broom. But who could stitch these ripped remnants together? I could no longer conjure up the face of Walter Milligan, the red-haired Irish boy I had chased up and down a football field—could no longer remember his face because I had neglected to memorize it.

Noticing and remembering everything would trap bright scenes to light and fill the blank and darkening past which was already piling up behind me. The growing size of that blank and ever-darkening past frightened me; it loomed beside me like a hole in the air and battened on scraps of my life I failed to claim. If one day I forgot to notice my life, and be damned grateful for it, the blank cave would suck me up entire.

From now on, I would beat the days into my brain. Every year, every month, I vowed this vow in a different form.

But the new scenes I tried to memorize with the aid of sentences were as elusive and random as the scenes I remembered without effort. They were just as broken, trivial, capsizing, submerged. Instead of a suspect’s face I saw red-lighted rain in front of a car’s taillight. Instead of the schoolyard recess scene I loved, the dodgeball game I tried to memorize at one moment, and then at another—my friends and I excited and whooping—I saw a coarse cement corner, and the cyclone fence above it, and only a flash of dark green school uniforms below. Instead of my sister Molly just starting to walk I saw the smocking on her blue dress, and her stained palm. These were torn and out-of-focus scenes playing on windblown scraps. They dissolved when I tried to inspect them, or dimmed, or slid dizzyingly away, like a ship’s stern yawing down the dark lee slope of a wave.