“What’s wrong with him, suh?” Grandmother whispered in her Carolina accent. She was dressed in the black bombazine and veils that encrust her in my memory.
The doctor tested me with everything in his bag—a leather tube to hear my heart, doses of castor, jalap, and calomel, plasters across my body—but came away shaking his head. “It isn’t clear yet, Leona,” he said.
“The royal curse?” she whispered, meaning Mongolism.
He pushed the idea away with a jab of his hand. “He’s rhinocerine,” he said, a word I’m convinced he made up that very moment, but Grandmother accepted it as at least something to whisper to God in her prayers.
Later on, I was able to pass myself off (in a gaslit room) as a man in his early fifties while being a terrified seventeen, but during my first few years it was not at all obvious what I was, or what I might become. So can you blame my poor maid, Mary, for whispering her Irish prayers, dropping her tears onto my head as she bathed me—thrice daily—in cream, soaking me over and over like a strip of salt cod? Can you blame my mother and grandmother for their careful preparations on calling days—the second and fourth Fridays of the month—when, fearing a prominent lady visitor, they delicately daubed my mother’s breast with laudanum and fed me so gently and intoxicatingly that I stayed in drugged slumber upstairs, unwailing, while they sat on the settees in long striped skirts? I take it as the best compliment I can: that I was unlike anything they had ever seen among the elms, the rich stone houses, the lacy parasols of their Christian Confederate world.
As the years passed, I changed as startlingly as a normal child, but my condition made it seem as if my body aged in reverse, grew younger, as it were. Born a wizened creature of seemingly great age, I soon became an infant with the thick white hair of a man in his sixties, curls of which my mother cut to place in her hair album. But I was not an old man; I was a child. I aged backwards
only in what I seemed. I looked like a creature out of myth, but underneath I was the same as any boy—just as now I look like a boy in knickers and a cap, though inside I’m the same as any regretful old man.
Doctors may read this; I should be more precise. In physical appearance, I have aged exactly opposite the world. Strangely, my real age and the age I appear to be always add up to seventy. So when I was twenty years old, I met fifty-year-old women who flirted with me as if I were their contemporary; when I was fifty at last, young women on streets were snapping their gum at me. Aged when I was young, and youthful now that I am old. I offer no explanations; that is for you, dear doctors of the future. I offer merely my life.
I am a rare thing. I have gone through centuries of medical history and found only a few like me in all the world, and even those, sadly, not like enough.
The first time-altered creatures in the literature are the Frabboniere twins, born in 1250 in a small village in the viscounty of Béarn. Named Aveline and Fleur, they were born with the illfortuned physical appearance of old women. As babies, they were brought to the kings of England and France, as well as to the pope, for they were judged to be not demonic children but signs from God that Christ was to come again. Pilgrims came to touch the children and listen to their babbling, hoping somewhere in there was a prophecy of the coming end. Their appearance, unlike my own, stayed the same while they aged, and as soon as they grew convincingly tall, they were treated as old peasant women and forgotten. Only doctors and the religious wanted to pay them visits. As soon as Aveline and Fleur reached the age they appeared to be, they both lay down in their common bed, holding hands,
and died. There is a grotesque woodcut of this scene. It used to hang above my own bed.
Another set of twins, Ling and Ho, famous through a series of eighteenth-century antisyphilis pamphlets, led lives that more closely resembled my own. Actually, only one of them did: poor, cursed Ho. They were born the children of a Shanghai prostitute (so the pamphlet read), and while Ling was an ordinary, drooling, pink baby, Ho was born much as I was: from the other end of life. So while Ling grew to crawl and giggle, Ho began to reverse. Our mutual disease, however, had crippled Ho from birth. He was always a kind of mummy in his bed. Even when he appeared to be more youthful, more ordinary, he still lay stiff and stupid, able to drink only beef tea, while seething at his brother’s good fortune. Eventually, nearing thirty, the brothers approached the same visual age. It was then that Ho was able, at last, to thaw the life that had been frozen in him for so long. Ling left his village, wife, and children to meet his brother on their birthday. When he came into his brother’s room and leaned over the bed to kiss him, Ho brought down the knife he had been hiding and, after letting his twin fall to the floor, turned it on himself. Lying in their sticky blood, the twins had at last become identical, and as no one could tell them apart, they were buried in a common tomb with the inscription that one man was blessed and the other a devil, but which was which could not be told.
The last I have found is a more recent man: Edgar Hauer. It’s a curious case that even my grandmother remembered. Son of a Viennese merchant, Edgar lived until the age of thirty before any of his symptoms manifested. It was only then that his appearance began to reverse, as mine has, and he led the rest of his life seeming to become younger and younger. I read his case carefully, hoping for a clue to his death (a major preoccupation for me now that the end is so near), but fortunately for him, he died of influenza before his fiftieth birthday, and his wife was left weeping
on the bed, holding what appeared to be the body of a ten-year-old boy in her arms.
And that is all. These are not lucky stories.
I should explain this disguise of mine. It’s no excuse to say that I pretend to be a boy of twelve simply because I look like one, but the fact is that I do. I am small and freckled and lonely; I have patches on my knickers and frogs in every pocket. Only a careful observer would notice that I have too many faded scars for a child of twelve, too mean a squint, and that I sometimes stroke my soft chin as if I’d worn a beard. But no one looks that closely. I know it seems hard to believe, but the world is wholly convinced that I am what I claim to be, and not merely because I’m so good an imitator after all these awful years. It’s because nobody notices little ill-dressed boys. We simply disappear into the dirt.
As far as anybody in this town knows, I am an orphan. According to the local gossip, I lost my father nearly two months ago, lost him in the spring lake-mist, and I was left here absolutely on my own. I was staying at the house of a boy in town and I fell upon the mercy of his mother to take me in. That boy was you, Sammy, my unwitting accomplice. That mother was your mother, Mrs. Ramsey, a local artist. I have lived here ever since.
Ah, now you recognize me, don’t you, Sammy? The sad blond orphan forced to share the bedroom of your boyhood. The odd child in the bunk below whose snore, I’m sure, you’ve memorized by now. If you are reading this, you are older yourself, and perhaps you will forgive me.
To play out this disguise, however, I have to walk to school each day and sit in idiotic classes. Today, for instance, was the Geography of America, during which we were told all manner of lies, including the fact that California (my native state) contains every
possible kind of terrain. I had to bite my best Ticonderoga to keep from speaking.
Volcano? Steppe? Tundra?
But twelve-year-olds would never know these words, and I must keep my cover above all else.
But why pretend to be a boy? Why not just enter the town, like any malformed midget, on the back of a circus elephant? Why not wear the crumpled hat and coat of the old man I really am? There are two reasons. The first, which I will get to shortly, is the Rule. The second, dear Sammy, is you. I have had time enough to consider how to find you, how to make my way into your life, how to slip into the bunk below yours and listen to the dog-yelps of your dreams.
I am told that the first person to realize my condition was not a doctor at all but our maid Mary. Much fun had been made of Mary in our household—Grandmother liked to tell visitors that, having been used to descending farm ladders, the poor young woman still walked backwards down the stairs—but the truth of it was she was a fragile and neurotic girl, given to fits of jealousy and tears, and to giggles at any flattery or praise, a ripe thing for any clever man’s picking. And just as in any Irish ballad, she went astray. I was still a baby when Mary was sent away—and sent away she was, because the unnamed lover left poor Mary with only a stillborn baby, a thistle pendant, and a broken promise. She was replaced with a girl remarkably similar—red-haired and simple Maggie—and was never mentioned again except by Father, enjoying a cigar with the men, and then as a different kind of joke. And so Mary was erased from the books at 90 South Park Avenue.
But she returned several years later, got in through the back door and reached the upstairs hall before Grandmother spotted her.
“Mary!” the old woman exclaimed, clutching her jet brooch.
“Mrs. Arnold, I—”
“How did you get in here?”
She no longer looked the part of a young woman. Her face was still attractive, but with the hardness of unripe fruit, and her eyes, which used to puppy-leap about the room, had been leashed and trained by the necessity of the streets. Her clothes were good, if a little flashy, but a closer look revealed how faded they were, as if she wore and washed them daily. Her hands were lined with the soot of the city, the ash that snowed from factories. Back then, all good women wore gloves, and why? Because the world was filth. But Mary had no gloves and here she was, fighting against the filth but no longer a maid; that was clear. Mary had fallen.
She smiled as she never would have when she lived here. “John let me in,” meaning John Chinaman, our name for the cook. “It’s a little thing, just a—”
“I am sorry, Mary,” Grandmother answered furiously, “but you have made your bed …” She launched into her usual speech about linens and destiny, but just then my nurse was bringing me from my mother’s room on my morning visit. Though I was nearly three, Nurse was still carrying me in her arms. Judging from the few photos taken of me then, I was in my most hideous stage, and all alather in lace when I caught sight of Mary. Permanently in purdah, it wasn’t often I saw anyone but my grandmother, mother, and nurse. I must have squealed in delight.
“Ah, look at him!” Mary exclaimed to Grandmother’s horror. The old lady cast an arm into the hallway to stop her, but Mary walked towards me and touched my raisin’s face. “Why,” she said, astounded, facing Grandmother squarely. “He looks like me pa, and he’s lost his white hair!”
Grandmother became stern. “Mary, I must ask that you turn out your pockets.”
“Mum, he’s growing younger.”
Both Nurse and Grandmother looked. It took a pair of eyes
that had been away from me that could compare my gnarled baby self to this new, smoother form. The addled Irish girl was quickly whisked out of the house (what had her purpose been: to steal, to beg, to haunt?) but no one could deny her effect on the household. What legions of doctors had failed to notice, a scarlet woman saw in an instant.
“I’m afraid,” the doctor told Grandmother when she called for him with the offer of old brandy, “that she’s right.” He sat in the upstairs parlor, sipping the brandy and looking about the room as if he planned to inherit it. “For what he is, he’s healthy as a pig.”
It was Grandmother who raised me. She directed my feeding and care, opened the windows to let in the chill city fog she hoped would cure me. My mother later told me that the old woman barred her from the nursery because she was sure I would be a source of grief, just a little headstone in a month or so, as with most children, but I like to think Grandmother kept me to herself in that high, bare room because she was lonely, and she hoped to love me a little: one last old man for her life.
Grandmother was an odd woman, and is only a faint memory for me, but I loved her. I loved peering at her rubbery nose and the roman candle of vessels that spread outwards from it across her cheeks; I loved the weird lace Regina bonnet she wore, and how its tight ribbon cut into her slack jowls, forming long pink welts when she removed it. I loved her because she was my only companion and because we grow to love the ones beside us.
I bet you’ve done the arithmetic. A boy born in 1871, seeming to be seventy, how long would he expect to live? Seventy years, of course. And if, like my grandmother, you sat above my cradle and worked at your pearl necklace like an abacus, you would take this expected age and arrive at the next obvious conclusion: the year
of my death. This is what Grandmother did, standing at the open window in her furs and studying my cooing form overflowing from my cradle with the warm, wrinkled skin of a pudding.
When Grandmother had calculated the date, she brought my mother in and commanded her to run an errand of such extravagance that poor Mama gasped with the bit of her still left to breathe above her corset. You would think it was an errand run for a prince in a fairy tale; you would almost think the old woman loved me above all else, and gathered these numbers like blankets to tuck around me in my fragile youth. But it was God she loved. Like the Fox sisters in their drafty mansion, she listened for the rappings of His spirit on my body’s wooden hull. So the gold pendant she had shaped and hammered at great expense was not for me; it was for Him, to show, as it hung around my hideous neck, that she had not been blind; she had seen Him at last.