My father came home from the Second World War empty. He didn’t look empty. He was much larger than when he went away, three years earlier. When he left us for the war, he was a lean twenty-seven-year-old, full of stories and jokes that made me and my little brother, Woodrow, laugh until we hurt. When he came home he was thick with fat and he looked forty. His arms stuck out from his sides, his legs were tight in his wool army pants, and his belly rolled out in front of him like a grievous load someone had forced him to bear. Even so, there was nothing inside him anymore, nothing for us. It was as if an overweight impostor was trying to pass himself off as our happy Dad. We won that war, but he came home glum as the losers.
I didn’t understand how war could make someone fat or how victory could make him empty. Woodrow and I thought his antics would be twice as good, now that he’d been to war and had come home safely, but we were wrong. We waited for his long, preposterous stories, his winks and chuckles, but he only sat unmoving in his easy chair, reading or dozing. Or he would go for long walks through town, refusing to let either me or Woodrow tag along. We nagged and pulled at his sleeves.We tried to remind him how generous he had once been with his time, but he acted as if we weren’t really there. He didn’t know us anymore. He had forgotten us.
It was hard to accept. I reminded him of his story about the airliner that ran out of gas and went down in the Gobi desert and how all the men passengers donated their suspenders so that the pilot could make windup motors out of them that would turn the propellers and allow the plane to fly everyone back to civilization, but he just looked mildly alarmed, as though only some kind of irresponsible idiot would tell such lies to children. We whined to mother, but she hushed us, saying, “Daddy isn’t himself yet. He’ll be all right, but we need to give him time. He saw terrible things overseas.”
I was old enough to imagine sex, and when mother became pregnant with Baby Bart, I was astonished. How could a man as morose and distant as our dad possibly arouse himself enough to have, much less enjoy, sex? But when Bartholomew was bom, Dad’s spirits sank even lower. And that amazed me, too. He ignored Baby Bart pretty much as he ignored the rest of us. He would sit in his underwear, smoking his cigarettes, staring into the blue nicotine haze. From across a room, I sometimes stared into this haze, too, trying to fathom the vision that had paralyzed his spirit.
We gave him time. But as the years passed, he became more sullen and withdrawn. He acted as if nothing around him had a real existence, including his wife and children. We were just smoky shapes drifting around him and sometimes pestering the quiet, empty spaces that occupied his reverie. The things he had seen in Europe had hollowed out the once-substantial elements of his prewar world. Then one day he packed a single suitcase and left home without a word of explanation, apology, or good-bye.
After a few months, Mother gave up on him. Then she, too, became sullen and indifferent. I didn’t know if she was just bitter for being abandoned or if the emptiness of my father had been a contagious thing that had infected her, too. She put on weight, and the heavier she got, the more distracted and heedless of the world around her she became. I looked for signs of it in Woodrow and myself, and even in Baby Bart. Could the same thing infect us? I struck poses in the bathroom mirror that reminded me of my father. I pushed my belly out, wondering if it could bloat. I imagined myself empty, and, imagining it, I felt it. Something solid but invisible rose up from my legs, gathered momentum, and assaulted my stomach and chest. It flew into my throat. My mouth fell open and I heard it screech over my tongue and past my teeth. My heart tripped and hammered against its bony confinement. I broke a sweat. I wanted to run, but a cold paralysis held me in its grip.
“What’s the matter with you, Bernard?” my mother asked through the bathroom door, tapping it lightly. It was a dutiful question, something a mother would ask. But it was empty of care. “Are you getting sick, Bernard?”
“No, I’m not getting sick,” I said. I told her that I was only laughing. “I just remembered a joke,” I said, my face in the toilet, the gleaming wet porcelain hollowing out my words until they became brittle shells of sound.
Time drained some of Mother’s bitterness away. She began to have dates now and then. The men she dated seemed generally lifeless to me. I would watch Mother and her dates sitting at the kitchen table over beer and potato chips talking in bored voices about weather or work or relatives. One man named Roger Spydell I remember because of his greenish complexion and his busy, nicotine-stained fingers. He would drum the table impatiently when listening to Mother, and when he talked, his fingers would punch little emphatic holes in the air. Roger drove a long black Packard Eight that drifted down our street like an ebony coffin that had been accidentally launched into a slow river. Mother and Roger would sit in the big car together in the driveway after a date, talking with their mouths almost shut and staring out the windshield as if at the dead immensity of the finite space immediately in front of them. Sometimes they would go into her bedroom, and Woodrow and I would listen at the door, but we heard nothing but the close-mouthed mutter of indifferent conversation, or the slow breathing of sleepers.
Another man she dated was critical of nearly everything. His caustic remarks would descend, in stages, from the loftier subjects of the national government and the state of public morality to the little things he found personally offensive in his everyday life. Criticism was the only form of expression that gave him the appearance of having purpose and energy. When the subject of conversation was not open to criticism, he became inarticulate and confused or openly bored. Words, to him, were cruelly sharp instruments to be used only for cutting away the fat from the lean, and sometimes the lean from the bone. He once actually said that criticism was his gift. He said this with a self-congratulatory smile. He looked as though he was waiting for someone to pin a medal on him.
A man I remember only as “Pincher” seemed, at first, to be full of life and good fun. He was a big pink man with a round hairless head. He was always winking at us and sticking his tongue into his cheek as if everything he observed was a joke. He brought us gifts. He brought Woodrow an imitation samurai sword he’d bought in Tokyo during the Occupation. He gave me a Red Ryder BB rifle, and he gave Baby Bart a Japanese doll-bank with a head that unscrewed. We called him Pincher because he liked to give us pinches. He pinched Woodrow and he pinched me. He pinched Mother until she begged him to stop. He gave Baby Bart little pinches in his crib until he screamed. Pincher pinched expertly and he pinched hard. Once I looked at the back of my arm and saw the blue imprint of his thumb and forefinger. When Woodrow cried after one of his pinches, he said, “Don’t be a baby, Woodrow. Maybe you ought to be in the crib with Bartholomew. Or maybe you don’t want to be a man someday.” He laughed when he said this, as if the notion tickled him.
Though I was several years older than Woodrow, Pincher made me cry once, too. I turned away from him so that he wouldn’t see the quick well of tears in my eyes, but he forced me to face him. Then he winked, stuck his tongue into his cheek, and tousled my hair. One day I accidentally caught Mother coming out of the bathroom in her underwear and saw that her arms and shoulders, as well as her thighs, were leopard-spotted with blue and yellowing welts.
About this time a shy bully at school named Dolph Hubler singled me out to be his latest victim. At fifteen I wasn’t as big or as courageous as I wanted to be. I was a disappointment to myself at five feet seven inches tall and one hundred and thirty pounds. Dolph, who had been set back two grades, was man-sized. He was close to six feet and probably weighed two hundred pounds. He was big and clumsy and forced by his parents to wear faded bib overalls and oversized oxblood wingtip shoes that were obvious hand-me-downs from his father or older brothers. Dolph wasn’t a natural bully, but had been forced into the role because of the sly smirks his appearance aroused. To keep these smirks at a respectful distance, Dolph would single someone out now and then in random reprisal.
Dolph would look for me in the crowd of kids loitering in the school yard before the first bell. When he found me, he’d slap the books out of my hands and then show me, and whoever else might be interested, his big raw fist. He made the top middle knuckle protrude as if introducing me to it. Then he would punch my shoulder hard enough to jar my collarbone. The first time he did this I was so stunned and panic-stricken that I couldn’t talk or move. Filled with a sick dread I hadn’t known before, I smiled at him. My smile was irrational since it had no bearing on my true inner state. Dolph towered over me, annoyed by this inappropriate smile that did not credit his power to instill fear. He had the body of a middle-aged beer drinker. His ears were big and fleshy, and when he walked, he waddled from side to side, the palms of his hands facing backwards, apelike.
Everyone was afraid of him. Each morning when he approached, my friends would drift away as if they had pressing business on the other side of the school yard. None of them wanted to show partisanship for me, knowing that such a foolhardy gesture could only attract attention to themselves as a possible source of future victims.
I ran with a clique of intrinsically cautious boys who liked to pose in rugged approximations of James Dean, Marlon Brando, and Aldo Ray, hoping to distract one another from the discouraging truth about themselves. They would slouch in groups, thumbs hooked insolently into the belt loops of their Levi’s, saying, “Well, then, there now,” in the breezy, dreamy way James Dean said it in Rebel Without a Cause. They would repeat this phrase to each other tirelessly, as if it were real conversation, packs of Chesterfields, Camels, or Lucky Strikes rolled into the sleeves of their T-shirts. Though they moaned at passing girls with the sexual menace of Marlon Brando, they would marry the first or second girl they slept with. They were in love with safety. After high school, they would pursue college deferments from the draft. They would plan sensible careers. And they would do nothing to attract attention to themselves, knowing instinctively that Dolph Hubler existed in the world as a principle, a mindlessly vengeful force, darkly determined to inflict pain and humiliation at random, but always gravitating to the most visible targets.
Dolph Hubler put a serious crimp in the safe allegiances I was in the process of adopting. Dolph was my first crisis in personal relationships. There was no way around him. I couldn’t put him out of my mind. I dreamed about him. In one of my dreams we went fishing together. We were wading in a stream. Suddenly I realized the fishing trip had been a ruse. Neither of us had fishing poles. He was going to drown me. I saw it in his face as he waded towards me. I woke up, fighting for high ground.
Dolph homed in on me each morning, knuckle upraised, his small colorless eyes unblinking. My cringe was internal, not visible, but Dolph perceived it anyway and rejoiced in it. Outwardly I pretended that the morning ritual between us was all in good fun and that his shoulder punches were not a great inconvenience. He would hit me and I would say, “Well, then, there now, Dolph,” in the casual, unhurried manner of James Dean. It was the way I had chosen to save face. All my friends approved of it. “Attaway, Bemie,” said one of them, his voice manfully hoarse in the whispering style of Aldo Ray. “You showed that pissant, Bernie.” Such congratulations were offered, of course, only after Dolph had lumbered out of earshot.
The trouble with my strategy, though, was that while it was face-saving to me, it was frustrating to Dolph. He needed to strip me of my James Dean front and expose me to our wide audience as a sissy, even as a crybaby. And so he increased the force of his punches until my lower lip began to tremble under the easy anarchy of my cool smile. He made an ear-piercing falling-bomb whistle to dramatize the ballistic arc of his punch and then the bomb-blast boom when the red knuckle sank into my shoulder deep enough to knock bone. I felt my well-greased hair lifted by impact into comical arrangements. My shoulder became a blue disaster zone of pulverized meat.
Mother’s latest boyfriend was a tiny, wiry man named Ducky Tillinghast. Ducky was smaller than me, but he radiated toughness. He’d been in the navy for twenty years and had once been featherweight champ of the Sixth Fleet. Somehow he’d caught wind of my difficulties with Dolph Hubler. One evening, after we’d all had dinner together, he took me aside. “Bullies are almost always yellow, Bernard,” he said somberly. “I say almost always because you never know for sure. There’s the chance that you have drawn the one in ten who is everything he says he is. But I guarantee you, son, most of them are pushovers when you deal with them properly. Why do you think he picked you, someone half his size?”
Ducky gave me a ten-minute boxing lesson I didn’t want. I had no intention of hitting Dolph Hubler back. As I watched Ducky holding up his little fists and shuffling his feet around, I felt a large surge of contempt. Dolph Hubler could pick Ducky up by the nape of his neck and throw him over the school yard fence. It was ludicrous to me, this pint-size man encouraging me to fight a monster the two of us together wouldn’t have been able to handle. I guess I was sneering a little at him, but he paid no attention to it.
“You set up the right with the left,” he said, pawing at the air. “You stick stick stick with the left, then you come over and stake him with the right.” He danced in front of me like a midget Sugar Ray Robinson. He showed me how to make a left jab snap like a flicked whip and how to put body weight into my right. He finally took note of my halfhearted and somewhat disrespectful attitude. It bothered him. We were out in the backyard. He offered me a cigarette. We smoked and talked in the dark among the throbbing crickets. “Look, Bernard,” he said after a while. “I can show you a thousand tricks, but if you don’t have the belly for a fight, then none of them can help you.”
I hated him suddenly. I was glad it was too dark for him to see how red my face had become or how my lip was quivering.
“I’ll tell you this, though, Bernard,” he said. “If you let it go on, you will eat so much dirt that eventually you will come to think it’s the only item on the menu. The world is already full of men like that.”
I saw Mother frowning at the cigarette in my hand. She was at the kitchen window, doing the dishes. I took a deep drag, making the burning tip glow brightly so that it would illuminate my face, which was again placid with contempt.
“What do you have to lose, Bernard?” Ducky said.
I pictured the things I had to lose. I saw my teeth sprinkled on the asphalt school yard. I saw my ripped shirt spotted with red. And I saw worse. I saw Dolph dragging me around the school yard by my ankles as girls in their crisp skirts and saddle shoes giggled with forbidden excitement. It was clear to me that I had an awful lot to lose. My friends would understand this. They were going to live by an understanding of it all their lives. They had already become experts in their midteens at cutting their losses. They were learning very quickly how to face the world with a handy smile while the world beat them slowly into pablum.
So, when I actually hit Dolph Hubler, no one was more surprised than me. I’d already decided that endurance was a greater virtue than the will to retaliate. I’d simply outlast Dolph. He’d get bored eventually and find someone more promising. But one morning my fake James Dean indifference suddenly collapsed. Dolph was especially disgruntled with my passive acceptance of his ballistic punches, so he doubled the force and the rate of delivery until he was panting with effort. I felt myself caving in. Something terrible was about to happen— I was going to cry or run away or beg him to stop. To prevent this, I dipped my shoulder away from his falling fist. This small act of resistance alarmed him. He wasn’t ready for it. His big, heavily freckled face sagged with surprise. Before I fully understood the movement that dipping my shoulder had started, my left hand was flicking at his nose. It snapped like a whip, just as Ducky said it would. As I jabbed, I rotated my fist so that when it struck, it punished. This was also one of Ducky’s many techniques. The feel of soft, yielding flesh under my knuckles was a revelation to me. It was equivalent in magnitude to my discovery two years earlier of masturbation. It was a new, illicit pleasure of the body.
Surprise continued to mount in Dolph’s face. Then it began to change into horror. His hands hung helplessly at his sides, paralyzed by this impossible turn of events. I took the opportunity to step towards him. My right foot planted, I was able to put my entire body weight into my right hand. It bounced off his nose with a wet, meaty thump. Dolph sat down slowly, like a man stopping in a wilderness to reconsider the path he’d chosen. A shining rope of blood twisted from his nose. Tears rolled from his eyes.
My friends congratulated me loudly, but their praise was tempered by dismay. An element of disapproval undermined the barking shouts that celebrated my victory. Eventually they drifted away from me. I was no longer one of them. I was untrustworthy, perhaps dangerous. I began to associate with a new, rowdier group. They were grittier than my old friends, but they hadn’t been gritty enough to challenge Dolph Hubler.
Exposed now for what he was, Dolph became the school clown. My new friend, Art Bannister, humiliated Dolph on a daily basis. He would punch Dolph on the arms or stomach and make him cry. Art declared one morning to an audience of hooting girls from the seedier section of town that Dolph would be their “Slave For a Day.” He would carry their books when asked, he would run petty errands, he would open doors, and he would bow when commanded to do so. Dolph Hubler in his oversized oxblood wingtip hand-me-downs became a living joke. How this flabby, stupidly dressed dork had ever been feared was so great a mystery that we could only deal with it by forgetting it. His past freedom to evoke terror was simply erased from the collective school yard memory.
Shortly after Mother broke up with Ducky Tillinghast, she took a job as hostess in a restaurant called Chez Frenchy. Her salary wasn’t much, but she did very well in tips. Chez Frenchy was owned by Frenchy Bigelow, a tall, hairy, slopeshouldered man who liked to wear jewelry, especially diamonds. He had a diamond stick pin, a wristwatch with diamond hours, a large signet ring with a diamond center, and a pinky ring with a big sapphire in it.
Frenchy liked to talk. He told me all about precious stones. Rare gems, he said, are connected intimately to the history of the world. The ancients believed some rare stones had medical properties. The Arabs and Hebrews, for example, considered the camelian to be an important prophylactic. The breastplate of the Hebrew highpriests were studded with topaz, beryl, onyx, ruby, emerald, sapphire, agate, amethyst, and jasper. Caesar paid the equivalent of ten million dollars for a single pearl. Caligula adorned his horse with a collar of walnut-size pearls. “But the diamond,” Frenchy said, “is the king of rare stones. It has made and broken empires, caused heads to roll, made billionaires of common men. The Koh-I-Noor diamond, for instance, was believed by the Sultan Baber of the Moguls to be equal in worth to the entire world!”
He also said that he’d been in the French resistance during the war. He’d been a right-hand man to Pierre-Michel Rayon, the famous underground leader. He had an autographed picture of Rayon. The picture looked as if it had been tom out of a magazine and the autograph was an unreadable corkscrew of blue ink. Frenchy was a friendly man who liked to recount his wartime experiences, when he was not reciting the histories of rare stones. The war fascinated me and I liked to listen to him tell about it. He said that he’d been responsible for blowing up three German tanks and an entire railroad bridge, complete with supply train. He said he killed an SS colonel with his bare hands. He showed me his large hairy hands and closed them slowly into fists, demonstrating their lifeextinguishing power. He regarded these lethal fists with a melancholy that spoke of war’s enduring sorrow. He told me how to make a bomb out of a mixture of sugar, acid, and calcium chlorate that could be used to incinerate a German staff car. He explained how to determine the structural weaknesses of railroad trestles. He recalled fondly the selfless courage of the Parisian graffiti artists who covered sidewalks, monuments, and the walls of buildings with brilliantly comic insults to the Third Reich. Frenchy’s best friend had been executed in the street after being caught painting a Cross of Lorraine on the door of Gestapo headquarters.
“It’s a terrible, terrible thing, this war,” Frenchy said as if it were still going on. “But it gives a man his purpose.” His eyes would get misty with scenes of heart-wrenching sadness as he spoke. “Your friends die in your arms, and it is very, very sad. But all the time you know in your heart that their purpose still lives and that they were their purpose. A man is not a man, Bernard, unless he is also a purpose. Do you comprehend this, my young friend?”
I nodded soberly, but he was over my head.
“Without a purpose, a man can be dismayed by war. War can drown the spirit of a purposeless man.”
I was grateful to him for telling me about the war. He had seen things that were just as terrible as the things my father had seen, but they hadn’t turned him into a silent brooder. Of course this was ten years after the war had ended and for all I knew my father was able by then to tell stories of the war with equal enthusiasm to some willing listener somewhere in the world.
“Do you understand how important it is to preserve your dignity, Bernard?” Frenchy said to me once. He was visiting Mother and we had just polished off a set of steaks that had cost her a week’s worth of tips. He made a church of his hands as he spoke, and the rare stones on his thick fingers flared in the light from the candles Mother had put on the dining room table.
“Sure,” I said, but as it always was with Frenchy, this was only his way of opening up a deeper subject.
“It is a ludicrous thing, really. Dignity, why do we insist on it? In the end, none of us have it. In the end, we are a few ounces of humble dust.” His rings and diamond cuff links winked richly in the candlelight. “And yet, without dignity, life becomes a monstrous slaughterhouse pageant without meaning.”
“Let’s change the subject,” Mother said.
“No matter what the enemy does to you, Bernard,” he said, ignoring her, “you must refuse to submit. His techniques may be subtle, and you may be tempted to bend to his arguments, but you must hold yourself apart from him. Deep within you there is the unviolated place of refusal. You must preserve this, under torture, under bribery, under his vile promises.”
“Oh, brother,” Mother said, rolling her eyes.
“I tell you, my young friend,” Frenchy continued. “Many many went along with the boche. Women and men. They licked the boot.”
I was very impressed with French Bigelow—from his knowledge of rare stones to his participation in the war. I told Mother this while we were doing the dishes later that evening. We still had on our good clothes and were both wearing aprons.
After listening to me praise Frenchy, Mother said, “Oh, honey, Frenchy’s an old liar. He’s never been to France, and the jewelry he wears is mostly fake. He’s from Detroit. He worked on a GM assembly line during the war.”
I found myself rising to his defense. “So what if he’s lying,” I said, “as long as what he’s saying is true.”
She shut off the water tap and looked at me, drying her hands on her apron. “Listen to yourself, Bernard,” she said mournfully, as if I had just proved beyond doubt that my early promise had been the biggest miscalculation of her life. “Just listen to what you’re saying, Bernard.”
But even though Frenchy was a liar, Mother married him a year later anyway. He was as close to rich as she’d seen, and money had always been a problem for us after my father left home. I don’t think she loved Frenchy in any kind of torch-song way, but she got along with him well enough. Frenchy was kind and generous to Woodrow and me and Baby Bart, and in return we were a faithful audience for his fabricated tales of life in the French resistance.
I used some of the knowledge I’d picked up from Frenchy to impress a girl named Sidney Graves. We were both in eleventh-grade chemistry. I’d been watching her from a safe distance since the eighth grade. She was not especially pretty, but she had eyes that stopped my heart. They were amethyst lavender, deep set, and her gaze was steady and serious under her tall, brainy forehead. Her eyes gave you the impression that the mind behind them had never entertained a trivial thought. She had long thin legs and narrow hips, but her breasts were womanly. Her hair was mouse-brown, but closer to gray than to brown. Sometimes, from a distance, she was mistaken for a teacher because of her iron-gray hair, perfect posture, and slow, purposeful stride. And because of this and the slightly English intonation of her speech (an impediment, I found out later, rather than an affectation), she was not a popular girl. Kids called her Lady Graves behind her back. She was the best student in math, chemistry, and physics and had already been offered scholarships to Berkeley and Cal Tech.
I was a poor chemistry student, and that was my excuse to talk to her. I asked for help with precipitates and catalysts. We studied together, first at school during lunch hour. I took these opportunities to show off my knowledge of gemstones.
“Did you know, Sidney,” I said, “that the Hindus believed that if you put the powder of ground-up diamonds into your mouth, you wouldn’t be struck by lightning? Or that lapis lazuli was prescribed as a laxative by Antonius Musa Brassarobus, the medieval medical scholar?” Her unblinking eyes studied me, assessing my credibility, and I’d feel my confidence start to crumble. “The color of a gem often changes its name,” I said quickly. “For example, a red sapphire is a ruby. But a yellow sapphire is called a yellow topaz. You probably didn’t know that topaz gets its name from an island in the Red Sea called Topazion.” I talked straight into those analytical eyes, hoping for the best. I wanted to bring up my knowledge of the French resistance, too, but couldn’t find a way to make the leap from gemstones to underground warfare.
Our study sessions eventually moved to her house. Her house was always empty when we got there every afternoon at three o’clock. Her father was a detail man for a pharmaceutical company and spent most of his time on the road. Her mother worked in a real estate office, sometimes not coming home until after dark.
“You’re the only boy who’s ever shown any interest in me,” she said after our first kiss.
The kiss was an accident hoping to happen. Our heads were close together, bent over the kitchen table as she worked out a reaction formula. I said, “Wait, you’re going too fast for me, Sidney.” She looked up, we bumped cheeks, our lips brushed together. My heart began to stumble against my ribs and I heard her catch her breath. I said, “I’m sorry.” She said, in her unintentional English accent, “It’s all right, it’s all right,” and we kissed again, involving our tongues this time.
These homework sessions gradually degenerated into kissing sessions. Then kissing wasn’t enough. We both went exploring. The first time I saw her naked breasts I almost passed out. The only breasts I’d ever seen were the low-slung overworked breasts of native women in National Geographic. Sidney’s breasts didn’t sag like theirs and her nipples hadn’t been elongated and chapped from swarms of little mouths. Her nipples were small and pink and alert with virginal anticipation. Staring at them, I started to shake all over. I was having a mild convulsion and knew that I’d stammer if I tried to initiate conversation.
Sidney’s explorations were at first limited to her hands slipping under my shirt, but she eventually grew bolder and opened my belt. Her explorations, unlike mine, were conducted coolly, with scientific reserve. She regarded sex as another learning experience, I regarded it as a tightrope walk to joy. When she took my penis in her hand, I came instantly, showering her hand and forearm with hot pearls. She didn’t pull away in disgust as I expected but bent closer to see the phenomenon, as a chemist might regard an unexpected catalytic reaction. “Oh, G-Geez—I’m sorry,” I stammered. “Don’t be,” she said. We took a shower together, and under the drumming water, on the slippery tiles, we gave each other our virginities.
These blissful afternoons were the high point of my life, but they didn’t last. Her father died suddenly in Cincinnati of a heart attack. Sidney and her mother went back east to live with Sidney’s grandparents so that her mother could recuperate and start her life over. I was frantic with grief, but Sidney took the philosophical view. “Our time together was perfect, Bernard. Nothing can change that. We’ll think about this years from now and be glad that we didn’t let it become a boring thing, ruined by arguments or unfaithfulness. You see?”
I didn’t see. “I love you, Sidney,” I said.
“I love you, too, dear,” she said. “And nothing will change that. I’ll change, and you will change too, but these last few months we’ve had can’t be changed by anyone or anything. We’ll both keep this time safe in memory, and memory will only make it better.”
I didn’t understand this or feel consoled by it, but I knew one thing: Sidney Graves was too smart for me and that, had we gone on together, she would have soon left me far behind. I was older than Sidney by three months, but the last time we made love I sensed that something in her was years older than I would ever be. This realization embarrassed me. I felt the displacement of someone who had always been over his head and was just becoming aware of it. I made some choking noises—disguised sobs. Sidney held me in her consoling arms; I buried my face in her iron-gray hair.
We said good bye in a strangely formal way: we shook hands on her front porch while her unsuspecting mother, smiling sadly, looked on from behind the living-room curtains.
Mother decided that Baby Bart wasn’t normal enough. She took him to the doctor, and the doctor recommended a child psychologist. Baby Bart was nine years old and quirky with goofball behavior. He wouldn’t talk for days, and when that passed, you couldn’t shut him up for days. He alternated between brooding and babbling from about age six on. And his babbling was weird. He’d want to talk about death and what happens to people after they died or where they were before they were bom. Frenchy humored him, but the rest of us ran for cover when he’d start in.
Mother asked Woodrow to show Baby Bart how to do normal things, like building model airplanes or using a compass to find your way out of the woods. Woodrow was an Eagle Scout and knew how to do a lot of practical things with limited resources. But Baby Bart was even too much for an Eagle Scout. Woodrow tried to teach him how to read semaphore flags, but Baby Bart’s constant questioning defeated his patience. Woodrow put a paper bag over Baby Bart’s head and made him keep it there.
Mother believed Baby Bart’s switching back and forth from total silence to annoying babble was a form of epilepsy. All the medical tests, though, turned up nothing. Baby Bart was normal, as far as any of the experts could tell. But he wasn’t.
“How can things just be?” he said to me once.
I was still grieving over my loss of Sidney Graves, who, I believed, was the only woman I could ever love, and was in no mood to put up with Baby Bart’s oddball ramblings. I ignored him.
“Stuff just is everywhere, but I can’t figure out how stuff can be stuff, the way it is, like dishes and hair and shoes and light poles and cities,” he said. “I mean, there should be no stuff at all, there should be nothing anywhere everywhere. And what is ‘where’ supposed to mean? Tell me what ‘where’ is supposed to be, Bernard. Or ‘there.’ Or even ‘here.’ What do you think?”
“I think you’ve been inhaling your own farts under the blankets,” I said. “For Christ’s sakes, Baby Bart, you should be talking about baseball or playing with your decoder ring. You keep this up, Mom’s going to have you committed to a nut house.”
The thing about Baby Bart was that he never took insults personally. He was big for his age, tall and wide, but he was also weak and flabby. He had no athletic ability. Not that I had any. I was a lounger, always on the lookout for cookies and other sweets. I’d already had two molars pulled, and fillings in ten other teeth. Woodrow, even though he was an Eagle Scout with merit badges, wouldn’t drink milk unless he could spike it with Hershey’s chocolate syrup. But Baby Bart was even worse. He sugared everything, even his peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches.
I once overheard him talking to Frenchy. They were in the kitchen late one night, having cookies and milk. In his nonstop talking phase, Baby Bart wouldn’t go to sleep. He’d roam the house, looking at things, reading a few pages from books randomly selected from the bookcase, or looking out the windows at the nighttime sky. I’d been reading in bed and came down to the kitchen for a glass of water when I heard them. I stopped to listen.
“Do dogs think?” Baby Bart asked Frenchy.
“They certainly do,” Frenchy said without hesitation.
“That means they have words in their heads, doesn’t it, Frenchy?”
“Well, I don’t know about that. Maybe not words...”
“You can’t think without words, can you?”
“Hmmm... let’s see. No, I guess you can’t.”
“A dog knows, ‘sit,’ and ‘come,’ and ‘fetch’ and ‘roll over,’ but that’s not enough words to think with, is it?”
“Maybe they can think without words,” Frenchy said.
“No, I don’t think so. I tried to do, it but it didn’t work. You’ve got to have words to think.”
“I guess dogs don’t think, then.”
“But they look like they are, don’t they? When a dog looks at you with his ears up and eyes all shiny, you could swear they are thinking.”
“I’m getting sleepy, Baby Bart,” Frenchy said. “I think I’ll turn in.”
Baby Bart banged the kitchen table with his head, startling both Frenchy and me.
“What did you do that for?” Frenchy said.
“Do what?”
“Hit the table with your head!”
“Oh, I was just wondering if I could shake up all the words in my head so that I would think different thoughts.”
Frenchy laughed. “Good idea, Baby Bart! You need to think some different thoughts, all right, but you don’t have to give yourself a skull fracture to do it.”
“I want to try to think like a dog someday,” Baby Bart said. “I want to think of something without thinking of it. Wouldn’t that be neat? That would be like figuring out a puzzle before you knew it was a puzzle. You’d be ahead of everybody. It’d be like having one of Superman’s special powers from the planet Krypton.”
“You make me dizzy, Baby Bart,” Frenchy said, yawning.
I walked into the kitchen then. “Hey, Bernard,” Baby Bart said. “Do you think dogs think?”
“Yeah,” I said. “They think about licking their balls, then they think about humping your leg. They’re real geniuses.”
Frenchy and I made our escape, but from my bedroom, all through the night, I heard Baby Bart roaming the house, rummaging through drawers and cupboards, paging through magazines and books, absorbing the small details of a world that had the inexhaustible power to seduce his sense of wonder.
We never stopped calling Baby Bart “Baby Bart” because he had a baby face that he was never going to lose. When he was stoop-shouldered and gray, that chubby pink face would still be open and naive and stubbornly impressed by the unsolvable puzzle of existence.
In 1958 the draft caught up with Elvis Presley, but I was safely enrolled in college by then. I got my 2-S deferment by majoring in electrical engineering. In any future war, I would be stationed, on the grounds of my valuable education, well behind the front lines. It was clear, even then, that the gun fodder for future wars would come from the marginally educated legions of aimless young males a society such as ours produces with almost conscious intent.
After I graduated, in 1962,1 married the third girl I’d slept with, Beatrice Carns. I got a good job at Lockheed Missiles and Space Corporation in the industrial town of Sunnyvale, just north of San Jose. A year later, Woodrow joined the marines and they sent him to officer candidate school.
Lockheed was the prime contractor for a submarine-launched ballistic missile called the Polaris. I worked in a unit that investigated quality-control problems with parts and equipment that were shipped to us by suppliers around the country. I traveled a lot, sometimes even to Europe. It was an interesting, even exciting job, but Beatrice became unhappy. She didn’t like it when I was gone, and she didn’t seem all that happy when I was home.
Beatrice was a tall, impatient redhead who had been a star volleyball player at San Jose State. We met in a Sunnyvale bar called the Vertical Takeoff. The bar was named after an experimental interceptor Lockheed was developing. The plane, never put into production, sat on its tail and went straight up a few thousand feet before it leveled off. What it did after that was ineffective.
It was happy hour and Beatrice, along with a few of her friends, was celebrating. She had majored in psychology and had just been hired by Lockheed’s personnel department. Mutual friends introduced us. We were both a bit drunk, but we looked good enough to each other to continue what chance had started.
I’d been at Lockheed two years by then, and Beatrice saw me as an insider, someone who knew the ropes. She was ambitious and wanted to become part of Lockheed’s management structure. I had no such desires, but I didn’t tell her this. In spite of her ambitions, Beatrice quit her job a few months after we were married. She wanted babies and a domestic life. At least that’s what she thought she wanted.
We rented a small house next to the railroad tracks on the east side of Palo Alto. The commuter trains roared by every half hour on the dot, shaking the house, making dishes rattle on their shelves. It may have been that simple, conversation-stopping intrusion, rather than any particular fault in either of us, that frayed our marriage bonds.
Baby Bart, who had joined a Christian brotherhood of some kind, came by to visit us once. He called himself a novitiate. He wore a sackcloth cassock, crude sandals, and was tonsured. He was living communally with his fellow brothers up in La Honda, but looked as if he’d stepped out of twelfth-century Europe.
Beatrice made a pot roast, complete with oven-roasted potatoes, carrots, and onions. Baby Bart had grown up to be a very large man. He was well over six feet and probably weighed two hundred fifty pounds, and he had an appetite to match. He put away half the pot roast, six dinner rolls, and most of the potatoes.
He guzzled wine like he did Kool-Aid when he was a kid. There was still plenty of food for Beatrice and me, but Baby Bart’s gluttony, along with his ascetic garb, irritated Beatrice.
“God bless this table,” Baby Bart said, wiping his gravy-stained mouth on his napkin.
Beatrice put her fork down hard on her plate. “You normally say grace before eating,” she said.
“The brothers think afterwards makes more sense, don’t you agree?” Baby Bart said. “That’s when you’re truly grateful, when your belly’s full and your mind is unwanting and at peace.”
Without a shred of self-consciousness, Baby Bart leaned to one side and released a thunderclap of gas. Beatrice threw her napkin down and went into the kitchen. The 6 p.m. commuter roared by, rattling the windows. It took a while for the train, which was headed north, towards South San Francisco, to pass. When it did, Baby Bart, his voice gravely with mucus generated by the rich food, said, “This table, this excellent fare, God put it here, expressly for us.”
From the kitchen, Beatrice said, “Oh, for Christ’s sakes.”
“You, too, Beatrice,” Baby Bart called out. “God put you here. He wanted you to be here, at this very moment. It seems trivial maybe, but it’s not. Nothing is trivial. We are all here, together, because God put us here.”
Baby Bart annoyed me, too. “So what’s your point?” I said, hoping to jettison the subject so that we could enjoy our dessert—cherry pie à la mode.
He turned his huge infantile face towards me, a pink topography of cherubic features. His eyes were large and sad and glazed with Christian love. “No point, Bernard. Just suggesting the obvious. What seems obvious to me, at least.”
Beatrice came in carrying a tray loaded with a steaming carafe of coffee, a pint of ice cream, and a deep-dish cherry pie. She was looking forward to ending the evening as soon as possible. “And Hitler?” she said, pouring coffee for Baby Bart. “Is it obvious to you that God wanted Hitler among the Germans? How about Caligula? How about the Boston Strangler?”
Bart sipped his coffee, spooned into his pie. “What is, is,” he said, almost too softly to be heard.
“So God has this black sense of humor, is that it?” she said.
“Everything hides God’s face. It’s all holy, Beatrice.”
“Crud,” she said. Her skin was very pale, almost transparent. When her temper flared, you could see small veins and capillaries near the surface. The blue pulse in her temple was visible—a danger sign. We fought often and I knew the signals. This evening was going to end badly.
I wanted to lighten things up. ‘“God is a comedian playing to an audience that is afraid to laugh,”’ I said, quoting Voltaire. It made no impression.
“Without horror there can be no bliss,” Baby Bart said. He set his coffee cup down and folded his hands in his lap, ready for the siege.
“You don’t have to defend the existence of Hitler or anything else, Baby Bart,” I said.
“Your religion, whatever the hell it is, is tailor-made for hypocrisy,” Beatrice said.
Baby Bart belched lightly. He leaned forward, elbows on the table. “This meal,” he said, speaking to Beatrice as if in confidence, “was truly a blessing.”
“Bullshit,” Beatrice said.
“This house, this furniture, the pictures on the walls, all of it, including you and your husband. Perfectly exquisite. It’s what God wanted it to be, and here it is.”
Beatrice picked up a dinner plate and Frisbeed it against a wall, shattering it and staining a painting of the Golden Gate Bridge, one that I liked in particular. The sun was under the bridge; the dimpled water dazzled the eye like a chest of gold coins that had been overturned; a three-masted sailing ship plowed west through glittering scallops of gold. “Did God want this, too?” she said, sending another plate flying at the wall.
“Things, not ideas,” Baby Bart said. “Things, not events suborned by ideas. You don’t know what you want, Beatrice. But no one does, really. It’s better not to want at all. Only God rightly wants. God rightly wants these lovely things, but people don’t know what they want, even when the object of desire seems so necessary. Thus the general unhappiness.”
“You’re deeper than whale shit, baby brother,” I said, hoping to defuse Beatrice’s growing rage. But Beatrice stalked out of the house, got into our car, and drove away into the night.
Beatrice and I began to fight regularly. Our arguments became the chief gossip of the neighborhood. Baby Bart, and perhaps the clockwork commuter trains, only triggered what was bound to happen to us sooner or later. We didn’t see eye to eye on most things, and sex became a chore for her, mechanical release for me. Even so, we had a child, a little girl we named Polly Delight. Parenthood did nothing to renew our marriage. In fact, the added pressure of caring for a baby made us fight all the more and with more intensity.
Beatrice had a loud voice that carried well down the pleasant tree-lined street we lived on. I threw a bottle of beer through the front window, and once took a hammer to the plaster walls. She threw dishes at me, screamed until the blue pulse in her temple seemed likely to burst. Once she picked up a bread knife and pointed it at my throat.
Neighbors, alarmed at this chronic racket, called the police more than once, and we had to face that embarrassment, but even the threat of public humiliation was not enough to moderate our behavior. Once I drove out of the garage without opening the door. She ripped the drapes from the windows, burned them in the yard. We found ourselves in an escalating one-up contest of destructive tantrums.
And then, in a moment of drunken candor, I admitted to having an affair with Heide Kreide, the daughter of a German rocket designer in Huntsville, Alabama. Heide hated the way Americans pronounced her name—Hi-dee Cry-dee, so she changed it to Heather Chalk, a literal translation. For some reason I thought this tidbit of information would somehow lessen the shockwave of my confession. Beatrice was not entertained. “You dirty, heartless son of a bitch,” she said, picking up little Polly Delight as if to shield her from the evil emanating from my person.
“No argument,” I said, knowing that we were finished at last.
“Things work out for the best,” Baby Bart said the next time I saw him.
“Sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t,” I said, feeling a bit philosophical myself.
Baby Bart had given up his full-time commitment to the brotherhood, got his MBA, and had taken a job at the Bank of America as a loan officer. He still wore his sackcloth cassock on weekend retreats, and saw no conflict of interest between the spiritual and the financial. “It’s all of a piece,” he said.
A year after Beatrice left me I fell in love with a girl who worked in the Lockheed blueprint library named Inez Pascal. Inez was almost ten years younger than me, but that didn’t seem to make much difference to her. We were soul mates. We told each other this often. For the first time in my life I understood what passion was. Inez was small and intense. She did nothing halfway. We would go out for lunch and wind up, hours later, playing the slots in Reno, work be damned. Inez had an apartment overlooking one of Lockheed’s parking lots. When I was laid off in 1968 after an argument with my lead engineer over my chronic absenteeism, I moved in with her. The narrow casement windows of her apartment made it seem like a cell. I spent my days there, watching soap operas or gazing out at the mammoth parking lot as it emptied or filled during the shift changes. Then Inez quit her job in protest over the Vietnam War. “That is where the war comes from,” she said, pointing a righteous finger at the low gray buildings of Lockheed Missiles and Space.
She joined the peace movement and became more intense than ever. She made trips into Berkeley with her new pacifist friends. She asked me to come along, but I refused.
“You’re apathetic,” she said. In those days the crime of apathy was second only to the napaiming of villages.
“No,” I said. “I just don’t think the nerve center of the military-industrial complex is located in Berkeley.” Under my glib words I was mourning her once, pyrotechnic passion, now diverted to the cause of sane international relations.
We argued, and the argument escalated until it included United States foreign policy, the American Medical Association, and Billy Graham’s influence (or lack of influence) over Richard Nixon. I finally agreed to go with her to Berkeley, but I didn’t join the march on Sproul Hall where the war-mongers were planning the incineration of the world. I was, by this time, thirty pounds overweight, almost thirty years old, and balding. I couldn’t see myself tramping along with lean, long-haired kids loaded on pot, chanting inflammatory slogans as the lines of bored cops itched in their riot gear. That was no way to end a bad war, or start a good one.
I had a hard time finding another job. Boeing made a tepid offer, but the job was in North Dakota and Inez refused to go there. There was no peace movement of any impact or glamour in North Dakota. I finally took a job in a large department store in a Santa Clara Valley mall as a plainclothes security guard. I had no experience, but I told the interviewer I’d been a brig guard in the marines. He didn’t ask to see evidence of my service. I had a boot-camp photo of Woodrow and I was prepared to tell the interviewer it was me, fifty pounds lighter, but he was so happy to have landed someone with real experience in handling security matters that he signed me on without further investigation. It was the Christmas season. If I did well, he said, my job might last until Easter.
It was an easy job. I wore a blue blazer, gray slacks, and carried a can of mace, a walkie-talkie, and a set of handcuffs. I worked in men’s clothing and in sporting goods on alternate days. It was a minimum-wage job, but they gave me discount privileges.
Inez spent Christmas Day in the Alameda County jail. I cooked the turkey anyway and ate hot sandwiches out on the steel porch of our apartment. The Lockheed parking lot was full, and the windows of the gray buildings thrived with feverish light. It reminded me of something one of Inez’s new friends once said: “The satanic mills will never stop unless we the people stop them, even if we have to use our own bodies to clog the gears and wheels.” It was a popular sentiment. I asked the boy who said this if he had ever seen someone who’d had his arm caught in a grain auger. “You fail to grasp the metaphor,” he said, dismissing me.
I was becoming, I realized, an object of amused curiosity among Inez’s new friends. One of them asked me to give him my draft card. He was going to mail a box of them to the attorney general’s office in Washington. I told him no. We were sitting on the floor of a luxury apartment that overlooked the sailboat, speckled bay. The apartment belonged to a professor. Everyone looked at me with expressions ranging from contempt to pity. I said, “I’m Four-A. What’s the use? No one’s going to draft me anyway. Where’s the metaphorical value in that?”
Because I was with Inez, I was treated like a dupe of the warlords rather than one of their toadies. “Poor old Bernie just doesn’t get it,” said the professor, a Trotskyite with tenure.
I received a phone call at work one afternoon a few days after Christmas. The store was having a sale and every department was mobbed. My supervisor told me to make it quick, two minutes at most. The call was from one of Inez’s friends, a boy named Peter Ordway. We had to yell at each other because there was a lot of background noise at both ends of the line—acid rock on his, shopping mobs on mine.
“You’re what?” I shouted, one hand clamped to my free ear.
“Denver. In Denver. Didn’t have time to tell you. It all happened so fast. Here, talk to Inez.”
“We’ll be in D.C. a few weeks, then New York,” Inez said, her voice quick with the happy excitement once triggered only by me.
“I thought you were at home, in the apartment. How did you get to Denver?”
“No time to explain. We’ve got to run to the United terminal.”
“We? You and Peter?”
“Yes. No. Not just me and Peter. Don’t be like that, Bernard. Jealousy’s so reactionary. Stay cool, darling. It’s not just Peter and me, it’s all of us. Everyone. We’re going to be doing some serious guerrilla theater. As much as the warlords would like to believe it, the revolution is not over.”
“Why did you call?” I said.
“Don’t sound so gloomy. The world hasn’t ended. I forgot it’s winter back east. Send me my wool sweaters, will you, Bernard?”
“Sure,” I said. She gave me an address in Georgetown. I didn’t write it down.
Just before closing time that day a deranged man entered sporting goods. He was wearing a 49ers jersey and cap. His pants were camouflaged combat fatigues. He didn’t have shoes. He was a big man with a dirty white beard. He stood in an aisle, laughing. He had a grand, Mephistophelean laugh that scared most of our customers out of the department.
My mouth went a little dry, but there was enough bitterness in me at that moment to cut fear’s paralyzing chemicals. I walked up to him, mace in hand.
“Shut up,” I said.
He wagged a negative finger in my face, amused. He was tall enough to look down on me. His sharp blue eyes were dancing with the merriment insanity can sometimes produce. He was benignly attentive to everything before him, like a god well pleased with the material fabrications of his inventive dreams.
I raised the mace so he could see it plainly. But he laughed again—a deep, booming, stagy laugh. He looked like Lee Marvin—rangy, lean, tough with stringy muscle. I sniffed the air between us for alcohol, but I’d been drinking earlier that day myself and couldn’t detect anything beyond the fecal stench of the man’s ruined liver.
“Come on, sport,” I said. “Let’s go, okay? It’s almost closing time.”
“Use it,” hissed my supervisor, yards away behind the safety of the canoes. “Use your mace!”
I didn’t want to use it. I hated mace, on principle. The madman turned and walked away from me. He overturned a display of golf clubs. Then he sent a rack of executive dumbbells thumping across the tile floor. I tackled him from behind and we went down, hard.
He was as strong as he looked. I tried to stay on top of him, but he lifted me off with a roar and I rolled into a low table stacked with Port-a-Potties. When I got up, I saw him moving with guerrilla stealth, doubled over as if avoiding gunfire.
Then he was coming at me with a duckboat oar. I waved a skateboard at him. It was total war, suddenly. My war. A war I wasn’t prepared to wage.
The slow oar stirred the air above my head. I threw the skateboard over his shoulder. He was a graceful, laughing warrior, I was mired in gloom. His war was happy and mine was not.
Then one of his demons nagged at him, complicating his attack. He lowered the oar and scratched his head, bewildered, his laughter slowing to a creaky groan, the residue merriment false. I took the oar out of his hands and laid it down.
His strength, which had been twice mine, was now miraculously atrophied. I handcuffed him easily. His flimsy wrists came together as though they were reeds. The look in his eye was apologetic and puzzled. He was ashamed of himself. The demon that had interrupted his oar-swinging zeal was sanity. It had returned like a dull oceanic depression, bringing with it overcast skies and a mild, enervating drizzle. It made him civil, circumspect, and ineffective. It made room in his heart for fear.
“I’m sorry,” he said, his voice surprisingly high-pitched now. “Something must have happened.”
I didn’t pursue what that might have been. A lot had happened to all of us. I thought of Woodrow, who had been wounded in Vietnam two years earlier and had returned home in love with morphine, then heroin. He lived first in the mountains northeast of Seattle, then in the streets of L.A. where Mexican brown was accessible and relatively cheap. After committing an exotic sexual crime, he spent a year in the hospital for the criminally insane at Atascadero. When he got out, he went to Holland. He figured Amsterdam was a good place to be a junkie and whatever else he was in the process of becoming.
I thought of Baby Bart, who had moved into a vice-presidency at his bank. He got married, and his wife, in her first pregnancy, gave him twin boys. In her second pregnancy, she had twin girls. Baby Bart wanted to name the boys Yin and Yang, but his wife, a Mormon farm girl from Logan, Utah, put her foot down. She named the boys Brigham and Joseph. Baby Bart got his way with the girls, though: Blossom and Autumn. They bought a house in Larkspur, a three-story brick with a half-acre yard. “God’s half acre,” Baby Bart calls it.
I thought of our father, who had gone to the last good war but had returned home from it an empty stranger, having suffered grievous ruptures to the soul’s delicate vessel. And I thought of our mother, making her bitter way as a sort of home-front camp follower, the question of dignity postponed for the duration, her calculating eyes fixed to a changeless goal—our survival. Frenchy Bigelow, who had built a cloudy fortress of lies against the daily invasions of conscience, never saw her long-range strategies, or the fierce tenacity that made them work. He believed he was simply and happily married to a worthy, hard-headed woman who allowed him, when the profits of Chez Frenchy merited it, small interludes of rest and affection.
And my Inez. She had harnessed her explosive, all-out passion to the ready yoke of righteousness. After her sorties to Washington and New York, and later to Bonn and Brussels, she would have no use at all for doubtful heroes like me who would never fight for the cause of the moment—unless they were caught in its feverish arms and combat was the only way out of that terrible embrace.
My prisoner sat on a stool in the supervisor’s office, waiting for the police. I sat with him, chain-smoking. He shot shy glances at me now and then. I could tell he had something on his mind.
“What?” I said.
“I used to be married,” he said. “She was a good woman. But I—you know...”
“I know,” I said.
He smiled, his eyes wise with special knowledge. “I bet you do,” he said.
He was quiet for a while, then said, “She called me Doctor Love. I don’t mean to brag, but that’s the way it was with us.”
His grin faded, his eyes fogged over with nostalgia and confusion and regret. “Goddamn bitch,” he said.
“I hear you, man,” I said.
“You ever notice that time runs backwards in a mirror,” he said abstractedly. “You figure that says something?”
“We can only hope,” I said.