In Third Form, the first year of high school, our classes moved to the gray edifice opposite the gym, Tillinghast Hall. I was placed in almost all Honors sections, my competence no longer a question. Horace Mann was my life—its classrooms where I earned my grades, its corridors where I met my friends, its auditorium where we sang hymns and heard senior speeches, its cafeteria where we gathered in groups to talk sports, philosophy, and politics over the daily fare, its teachers (“Sir!”) now familiar elders to petition and charm.
I advanced to Caesar in Latin, Tennyson and Sinclair Lewis, Geometry, and Biology with its white formaldehyde rats. We each had to slice open a wet furry body and pull out and identify its intestines, liver, kidney, heart, and vaguer organs. This was far more tangible a demonstration of reality than I was ready for, plus I didn’t like to think about how we came by so many rats.
During respites in the day a group of us took to heaving a baseball back and forth across the central campus. My main partner was a classmate named Steve, a flippant kid with a childlike face and freckles, one of the wise-guy jocks. I knew him mainly from Latin where he was struggling, his butchered translations earning Mr. Metcalf’s taunts and antics. Our teacher regularly slammed a paperweight on his desk to keep us alert and occasionally threw chalk or hardballs at the unprepared—he had a drawer of different-sized baseballs for this purpose and laggards had to duck whenever a side-armed toss went careening across a desk. Steve was his favorite target.
One afternoon, my classmate trailed me from the field and, out of the blue, invited me to his house in Scarsdale overnight for a party. It was the first such offer I had ever gotten—the risk of bedwetting a long-time deterrent—so the whole rest of that week seemed charged and buoyant.
On Saturday morning I took the train from Grand Central, past Harlem, into the countryside. Steve and his mother met me with a station wagon and drove us back to their house. From there he and I trekked to a neighborhood field and joined local kids in skying a hardball across the meadow.
Everyone was jiving, launching shots, making plays, hitting the cut-off man. I was in perfect rhythm, attentive to the moment, its impermanence making its auspiciousness more dear. I gave the ball everything I had that day, racing to intercept its pellet flight, rolling as I trapped it, jumping up and flinging it back in, acting as if I belonged. My life was somehow on the line in that ragtag game, if only I could time my breath, the arc of flight, the infinity of blue…. As usual I felt hopelessly complicated and obscure—Pinocchio’s dilemma: “I want to be a real boy!”
Dr. Friend would lecture on about alienation, trying to get me to acknowledge feelings of depression and anger as if these were now the clue in the embers. One day while I was talking about Joan Snyder, he startled me by asking if I had masturbated. I knew the word, but I didn’t know what it meant. He explained.
I couldn’t imagine more than my penis getting hard. He said that semen could spurt out too.
“Fantasies are imaginary,” I responded. “They’re not real enough to make something like that happen.”
“Oh yes they are,” he rejoined. “And you, of all people, should know that.”
He didn’t pursue it.
He wanted to wake me up, melt Pinocchio’s numbness and turn him into a real boy, and I wanted that too. But something was missing, some basic fact of life.
“Whither is fled the visionary gleam? / Where is it now, the glory and the dream?” That was it in a nutshell, clear as day, one unlikely afternoon in Alfred Baruth’s English room, sending a chill down my spine. It needed no scholarly exposition, no psychiatric unravelling. Could Wordsworth have known something that Dr. Friend didn’t, born as he was more than a century before Freud?
Anyway, I would be dispatched at day’s end, back to the Towers apartment, and I sensed that it would take me half a lifetime to return to this dandelion field.
After dinner Steve led me upstairs to his room and we took places, me on the couch, him slouched on his bed, as we rehearsed translations for next week’s test. I knew he was failing the class, so I adopted the role of enthusiastic tutor, throwing my ballfield rhythm into Caesar’s Gallic campaigns, line by line, mimicking Metcalf’s renditions of onomatopoeia and the uses of the dative and ablative, hamming it up with the master’s husky metronome-like intonations. I was quite willing to give my friend everything I could in exchange for the gift of this day. Suddenly I noticed it was getting dark, “Hey what time is the party?”
“I forgot to tell you. It was cancelled.”
It meant nothing to him, but my heart sank at those words.
A moment later, with a mischievous smile he pulled a tape recorder from under the bed. He had made a copy of my performance and was going to use it for his homework. For the rest of our time at Horace Mann he thought that’s why he lost me as a friend.
Wordsworth’s “Ode on Intimations of Immortality” was my baptism, the awakening bell. Throughout the autumn of ’58 I made kinship with an autonomous literary voice, a timeless hit parade with compass to inspire across centuries beyond life and death. Its chart-toppers included John Donne’s blood-mingling flea, Walter de la Mare’s “silver fruit on silver trees,” Matthew Arnold’s “naked shingles of the world,” the wolf dog of Jack London’s Call of the Wild, the suicidal sleigh ride on which Edith Wharton sent Ethan Frome. It resonated in Willa Cather’s “precious, incommunicable past” and Emily Dickinson’s “blue and gold mistake”—a sixth sense for recovering cardinal runes and dissolving surface mirages. Such was the power of art to grant a fourteen-year-old safe passage, anywhere.
I was reading not just for graded study now but catharsis, for I intuited in myself the same mystery that drove Baruth’s authors to eloquences of revelation. Freud’s symbolic universe loomed large, but it was a façade. A more abstruse reality seeped from every courtyard light, Indian-summer tree and rooftop water tower, from flocks of birds crossing the last luminations of urban twilight. There was a realm of untapped wonderment, as big as the sky, and it conjured me through my turbulence and gloom.
I spent hours in the Museum of Natural History, passing from mural to mural, gazing at animals in dioramas of the Rockies … Africa … Alaska … the South American forest, the pygmy drawing his bow by a broken ostrich egg. Their stark, magnificent specificity reflected my mood. The Siberian tiger in his golden striped flesh against violet-dimmed winter was a force, though stuffed and mounted in artificial scenery, a force I acknowledged but could not name. His majesty—and that of mountain sheep and antelopes and snow leopard—held the key to the trance I was in.
“Twas brillig, and the slithy toves” said it all by saying nothing. Alice in Nonsense-land, the world did “gyre and gimble in the wabe.” My vernacular Top Twenty was full of it’s inscrutable rapture. It was the Platters, “tears I cannot hide,” Ricky Nelson, “and the only price you pay,” Little Anthony, “I’d gladly take you back / and tempt the hands of fate.” What else was there but those hands of fate, that stranger across a crowded room? “Who can explain it, who can tell you why? / Fools give you reasons, wise men never try.”
I opened most weekends with a Friday night concert before our parents got home. Alone with my Magnavox I put on one 45 after another and lay there suffused in the worlds of feeling they invoked. It was not so much their lyrics—although those uncannily paralleled my sentiments. No, it was that each tune-word combination was idiomatic and complete, a trace of something ineffable.
My song for those months was Cathy Carr’s “First Anniversary.” Her happy/sad tomboy voice spoke for Joan Snyder and my unlived self:
Though such sweet, perky simplicity seemed beyond me, it was everything I worshipped and wanted to be, wanted to find in the world. I would sprawl on the floor against my bed, in touch with a reverence, an incipient joy that, though not as familiar to me as languor or fear, seemed equally to lie at my core. It was, as Bobby Darin proposed, “Every night I hope and pray”—a prayer—and: “Dream lover, until then, / I’ll go to sleep and dream again…. ”
Then those Photo Fair, gee-whiz-dreaming Everly Brothers; Paul Anka summoning three syllables of a teen goddess “Di-an-a”; Neil Sedaka, “Happy Birthday, Sweet Sixteen” (“It’s just that you’ve grown up / before my very eyes); Dion & the Belmonts: “Now if you want to make me cry, / that won’t be so hard to do. But the promise always, from Wordsworth to “Dover Beach” to Thornton Wilder: “ … the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning”; so Dion on cue: “And if you should say goodbye / I’ll still go on loving you….”
How could lyrics be any more exquisite, more perfect? I melted my heart and voice into theirs, participating in a spontaneous force that supported and carried me along, as if melody were rich enough to hold Creation. Even the uncued silences between words resonated with undisclosed meanings.
“Each night I ask, the stars up above …”—my echo drawling out the “s” and “r” and “v” even more than Dion, in total agreement: that it was sad but that it was also wonderful … that someday I would get to the bottom of this.
There was one song in which the deceptively simple words had no discernible connection to their power over for me:
I’ve a-laid around / and played around / this old town too long,
Summer’s almost gone, / winter’s comin’ on.
Which winter? What town?
I saw a village out west. I heard the distant echo of “Winter Wonderland,” my mother in her black velvet overcoat, walking on new-fallen snow of Central Park in a landscape that seemed before even Lenape longhouses and canoes, a panorama of childhood in a divining jar through whose opacity crystals fell.
But it was more than that. Just the word “winter” was evocative—the feeling of cold flakes on my skin, sleigh rides with Daddy, steering around the Park’s titanic outcroppings, colored lights street after street.
Dr. Friend would review the song with me by stanza:
Papa writes to Johnny, / but Johnny can’t come home. / Johnny can’t come home, / no Johnny can’t come home.
“It’s your brother, of course,” he noted cursorily, an obvious association for which I took his word.
Papa writes to Johnny, / but Johnny can’t come home. / ’Cause he’s been on the chain gang too long.
Yes, Jonny it must be. So obvious. Yet it didn’t ring true. Right name, wrong tone. The “Johnny” in the song was some sort of bandit hero. He was an offshoot of “Oh, my papa,” Eddie Fisher singing his requiem, “To me he was so wonderful …,” the sword of cancer shadowing those very words … “another place/another time” (Bridey Murphy). Everything so convoluted, so inextricable!
“What about the chain gang, Richard? Do you picture your family in New York as a prison in which your brother is trapped? Your own father can call you home but not your brother who can’t leave his family.”
Maybe. Then, does that mean I feel sorry for Jon? Is there some other Jonny hidden inside my brother who would be my friend in better circumstances? Are we westerly bound bandits in another place, another time? Does the song call for him from behind its yearnful drone and jaunty cowboy voice?
Not enough! Still not enough! This was Planet Mars big, big as the ocean sending waves across itself, cosmic-ray big, big as all the cities on all the stars in the universe. Or, maybe it was just the prophecy of escape, that someday I was going to walk out of this place into my destiny. A dark November day bearing the amulet of my birth sign….
And I feel like I gotta travel on.
Soon after getting my Minolta, I became friends with the president of the Horace Mann camera club. His name was Billy; he was short with a big owl-like face, and I liked him because he was kind and well-spoken as we ranged over topics on our subway route home. He didn’t talk about sports or girls and parties—a relief. As we sat in facing seats, I blabbed on about my mother and stepfather, the family at Grossinger’s, the scene at the Hotel.
The first time we got together outside of school or the IRT was a Saturday gathering of the camera club—a trek through Greenwich Village, each of us stocked with recycled canisters of bulk film from 35-millimeter rolls—less than a penny a shot. We loaded them ourselves inside black boxes we all owned—a giant reel in one compartment, a spool, tin capsule, and clip-top assembled in a tiny adjoining one after attaching the exposed leader with scotch tape to the spindle and rotating the crank.
Moving as a group, we photographed derelicts, kids at play, and generic urban landscapes, occasionally isolating car tail-lights into funny faces, racing to be the first to find and frame a qualifying vehicle. Afterwards Billy and I went to his apartment where his stepfather orchestrated a wide-ranging dinner debate on world events.
I couldn’t imagine reciprocating at my apartment, so I came up with a more audacious plan: I asked Aunt Bunny if I could invite Billy to Grossinger’s.
“Of course. I think you’re old enough to have a guest along.” While conceding that my father would probably object, she brushed it off, “He’d just be scared that Billy would trip over a rock and his parents would sue us—that’s all.”
My promise such a thing wouldn’t happen caused her to laugh out loud.
Ray picked me up after school on the Friday of spring vacation and headed downtown to collect my stepmother at her psychiatrist. As she emerged from the canopy I ran from the car to greet her. She was whistling and didn’t stop, nodding hello in lieu of words. She asked if I could guess why. I couldn’t, so she told me: Dr. Corman was leaving the building at the same moment, and she was letting him know I was her son too, a version of “Yessir, that’s my baby.”
I felt an unexpected surge of tears.
Then she remembered about Billy and began to list the exciting things we could do together. Right then and there I knew I had made a mistake.
I had five days of breathing room before my friend’s arrival, so I made the most of them, throwing myself into an old-fashioned Grossinger’s spree. The first morning in the country Michael, Jimmy, and I took sleds to the golf course and raced one another down hills. We were daredevil clowns, flying over bumps and tumbling into drifts. Then, noisy enough to be hushed by Uncle Abe, we hit the dining room at the peak of lunch, hair covered with ice balls. After gobbling down potato pancakes and pineapple blintzes, we ordered all four desserts (cookies, lime sherbet, strawberry shortcake, and date-nut slices) and went back out for a snowball fight.
All day long I was the kid from Grossinger’s, the native son, carefree and reckless—I had heard the call of the wild. At night I reverted to the scion of Horace Mann, an equally sublime role.
“Richard’s doing his Egyptian hieroglyphs,” Michael announced. Aunt Bunny smiled and half-heartedly told him to get back to his own homework. But you couldn’t change the spots on the leopard or turn Grossinger’s into the Sorbonne. It was near impossible to disengage from the Hotel’s mood of dalliance and return to my lettered allotments. No one there paid more than lip service to schoolwork or grades. Toys, desserts, TV shows, and whims of recreation ruled. Michael and James at best raced through an abridged version of a spurned ritual. The mere solving of a page of math problems or translation of a Latin chapter—assignments on which I spent hours per night and entire weekends in New York—seemed as alien here as decoding a document from a Phoenician shipwreck.
I’d be in my hardcore study mode, bearing down, driven by monastic pride, as from the background came decibels of 77 Sunset Strip or What’s My Line?, the whole family watching, a rite I adored too, particularly our last call for milk shakes, cookies, and ice-cream sodas from the canteen. For that I took a break and crossed over.
Later in the week the air turned warm, and the snow melted. It was suddenly spring. Upon hearing that I was studying biology, Milty found an old microscope somewhere in his domain and presented it to me. The next morning I collected water from the lake; then Michael and I kneeled on the floor of his room, directing sunlight from the machine’s mirror through a slide. It illuminated paramecia and other tumbling creatures: a miraculous spectacle—a world inside a world, shut off and immune, invisible except for the curve of a tiny round glass.
Michael was amazed to see such beings, astonished that they looked like real animals, swimming about with a purpose. I told him that we were like Alice at the bottom of the rabbit hole after swallowing the EAT ME cake, too large to make ourselves known.
The next morning I brought the metal scope to a different pool, the golf-course water-hole. Kneeling on its edge, I used a dropper to fetch a bead of elixir, put it on a slide, and found an unexpected treasure: a bumper crop of one of the secondary phyla Mr. Moody had cursorily scooted over—dozens of whiskered rotifers whirling about and caroming off each other.
After dipping an empty honey jar and filling it with the pond’s broth, I carted my sample and the microscope around and demonstrated the animalcule circus, first to a flabbergasted Milty, then to an applauding Grandma Jennie, finally to Aunt Bunny and Michael and James. Cute rotifers collided and veered among the diatoms and plankton like a cartoon of tiny cats, unaware that they had been in a pond and were no longer there. “What a delightful discovery you have made,” Aunt Bunny declared. “And not a golfer would suspect it; he would only be concerned with his lost strokes.”
Before dinner I returned the unviewed remainder to their home.
That Friday the event I had set into motion came to its inescapable denouement. Ray pulled up at the house. I prayed for PG’s car to be empty. It wasn’t. My friend got out and stood in the road, yawning. I observed him from the upstairs window: a diffident, self-conscious boy I barely knew, in a suit jacket and tie with a beat-up suitcase. He didn’t belong here.
I wanted to run away, to never have been wiled by him or shared intimacies on the subway. I hated the part of myself that had been needy enough to befriend him. Michael grunted in slapstick, declaring, “Your friend looks like Iggy.” He didn’t, but this was no joke and I refused to meet his flippancy.
“Aren’t you going to show me the Hotel?” Billy asked excitedly as I led him upstairs. I had talked about it enough; now it was at hand. I managed a nod. As my mother liked to say, “You made your bed; now you can lie in it.”
For the next two days I took Billy on a tour of my alternate reality while trying to regain camaraderie. Yet habits and gestures of his that once attracted me to him now seemed pretentious and affected. As he stumbled around the rink, I pretended not to know him. Later that day I left him in a beginner’s group at the ski slope while I took the rope to the top and sped down past. What an asshole I was! But I couldn’t help myself. The next morning I avoided getting packed into a toboggan with him, squirrelling my way into a different group, leaving him to ride alone with a couple and their child.
Without the charisma I had projected onto him, Billy was a priggish adversary who resented my indifference and demanded courtesies I withheld. But he was also a decent kid who lost his way in the hullabaloo of Grossinger’s. He didn’t know how to act or what was expected of him. How could he? That was my job, his host, to make him comfortable enough to shine. Trouble was, I didn’t like him anymore. So I made things hard for him much in the way I learned to do with my brother Jon—sneakily and irreproachably. I lavished more attention on Michael—on Milty, Irv Jaffee, and Jack the waiter. This was my preserve—no intruders allowed, certainly not uncool chumps or jackasses. All along I maintained a supercilious, chatty front. He kept asking, “What’s wrong. Did I do something?”
“Nothing,” I snapped.
It seemed that, once upon a time, through an improbable act of fate, I had escaped the Towers household and been given an unwarranted dowry like Dickens’ Pip. I should have been grateful, forever humble, but I had been practicing anything but humility. Through the years of coming, as if self-effacingly, to my father’s preserve I had turned into a tyrant too. Even as I gallantly pretended to disavow Richie Rich, I played him to the hilt, the owner’s son. I enacted my mother’s false pride, exclusivity, and misanthropy, her condescension and cruelty toward others.
New York Richard was a shy, accommodating chap, modest and deferential, nose to the grindstone. He kept a low profile and turned the other cheek. Grossinger’s Richard was a careless, slaphappy miscreant, lacking, when the chips were down, even minimal decency. Handed everything, he extended and bestowed nothing. The two selves denied, even shunned each other. Together they had conspired to fool Dr. Fabian; now they kept their scheme from Dr. Friend.
I had told myself for years that Jonny was the bad guy in our household, a bully and punk; I was his hapless victim. Now I found myself just as much a bully, in fact more so. For I was not only treating a harmless friend worse than my brother ever treated me, I was proving that this behavior of mine didn’t need a valid excuse; it was in my character: I was an irascible trickster, Martha’s son through and through. Olivia de Havilland—as Catherine in The Heiress—spoke my lines when I spurned Billy exactly as she would have: “Yes, I can be very cruel. I have been taught by masters.”
I didn’t realize this as much as forebear its tawdry implications and unconscious guilt. I felt like a centipede exposed by its rock being turned over, scurrying to dig back into the dirt.
After three days Billy and I had run out of ruses. Our silence marked the demise of our friendship. But this time I was an undisputed jerk. I had been provoked by little more than embarrassment over a boy’s ugly suitcase and provincialism.
Perhaps that’s why I nursed the story of Billy and me so long, drawing it out until even Dr. Friend was exasperated: it held an unpleasant truth which I could neither admit nor stop picking at. I couldn’t tolerate intimacy. I couldn’t permit my two identities, Horace Mann and Grossinger’s, to share a friend or, more precisely, have that friend watch me squirming between them while pretending it was business as usual. I couldn’t integrate my two selves: the docile, intellectual schoolboy and the slaphappy, arrogant prince regent. Each was the other’s worst nightmare.
“What are you really thinking?” Dr. Friend would ask tiredly, again and again. “You’re a human being, you have flaws, you don’t always behave well. Welcome to the club.”
He was right, but my split selves, even as they hid behind each other, refused to come clean, to become reconciled enough to answer.
The end of P.S. 6 for my brother marked our departure from Park Avenue. Debby was attending the private bilingual Lycée Français, so there was no longer any reason to hang on at the boundary of the Upper East Side school district. We could get more space for less money on the West Side.
Placards advertising “apartments available” on façades of stone buildings had been invisible mainstays of New York, background art in an illustrated Gotham. Now as I saw them with fresh eyes, I imagined life inside each unknown monolith with six or seven cryptic rooms to let: kitchen, living room, dining room, bedchambers. Every time we were given a key and shown around, it was like briefly being another family, filling those spaces with our meals and melodramas.
After a six-week search, my mother and Bob settled on an affordable unit in a huge twin-towered building on the Park at 90th, the Eldorado Towers; we became denizens of 8C, 300 Central Park West. Bare of furniture, the space was evocative, an uninterpreted dream. A small cubicle with its own bathroom adjoined the room deeded to Jon and me. It was pronounced my study in order to allow me to work at night after he went to bed.
“How do you like it?” my mother asked.
I surveyed the gloomy nook overlooking a dark courtyard and answered without thinking, that it looked a bit cramped. That sounded ungrateful, so she slammed the door, adding a few seconds later from down the hall, “You’ll learn to like it. At least you better.”
Before the move she took me downtown to buy furniture for both my study and the “boys’ bedroom,” though she far exceeded their combined capacity—throwing in a desk and bureau for Debby, some chairs for the living room, and assorted tables. Then she charged it all to Grossinger’s by having me sign the slip. We had performed this ritual numerous times—the previous summer the Hotel paid for Jonny’s as well as my Chipinaw clothes. My autograph was gold.
“They can afford it,” she said, “and they owe me this.”
I played a prank on Jon soon after we moved in. I attached a ball of string to the cord of the ceiling light in my study and ran it under the door into our bedroom. I took the remaining core into bed with me and, after an interval of feigned sleep, tugged the string to turn on the light. Jon propped himself up. “Who’s in there?” he whispered.
“I don’t know. Maybe someone’s gotten in the back door.”
I shook the string to create a rattling noise. Then I jerked it twice in succession to turn the light off and on again.
He jumped out of bed. “I’m getting Mommy.”
“No, wait.” I hadn’t meant for it to get that far.
I heard him waking them up, so I pulled on the string to turn out the light, but it snagged. I pulled harder and harder.
They were walking down the hall. They were opening the study door. I gave one last frantic yank! The light went out, the string came loose, and there was a crash of things falling off my desk—shades of Richard Oranger.
I pulled and pulled on that string until finally I got to the knot at its end, which I gripped to my belly like life itself. When they burst into the bedroom, I was frozen in perfect mime of sleep.
Jon and I didn’t fight physically anymore. We had begun to find language for our quarrel. Before sleep we lay in bed, dickering philosophies across the room. In our customary debate he took the viewpoint that the main goal in life was to have fun. “You have to agree to that, Richard!” he insisted. “How could you not admit something so obvious?” He thought I was denying it only to provoke him.
I, in turn, argued that the point of life was to figure out who we were.
“You think you’re such a bigshot,” he rejoined, “with that doctor telling you stuff. You don’t know anything. What you’re saying is so stupid and fake! Even the rabbi calls you an infidel, but you try and get away with being superior and holy.”
That was household orthodoxy: on top of my other vices Jonny was a good Jew and I was the quintessential anti-Semite. Furthermore, anything colored by psychoanalysis was discredited perforce, as if obvious to anyone with half a brain, anyone except indoctrinated fools like Richard Grossinger.
We had no subtexts, no sublimations, no shadows. Paradoxes were prohibited within ten yards of discourse. The Towers family meant to go the distance by declamations, fake moralities, and righteous indignation. They were interested in things, not their effects.
For the rest of my sojourn in 8C Jon challenged me on this point—meaningfulness over fun—not considering I might really believe what I was saying, that it wasn’t a ploy to get his goat, though I could see he wasn’t having much fun. In fact, he was miserable, fighting ghosts, performing other compulsive rituals.
He would put a hand on the light bulb of his desk lamp and dare himself to keep it there. When that became unbearable, he cried out in pain and asked me to remove it because he would be a coward if he did it. He would read the same page again and again, reaching the end and then going back to the beginning. Desperate to break the spell, he would transfer the responsibility, summoning me from across the room or my study to turn his page, to dispatch the demon so he could read his book.
He was not unaware of these self-imposed torments, but he believed he was enjoying himself nevertheless because fun was his priority. These episodes were not anti-fun, they were just a different path to gratification.
His lack of curiosity about his own nature consigned him to blind misery.
Eventually we agreed to have Bridey judge our respective positions: whether the meaning of life was having fun or solving its mystery. After we presented our briefs to her (like the golden apple at the Judgment of Paris), for a moment she stared at us in stunned disbelief. Then she snapped: “Get out of here with your tomfoolery, the both of you!”
Debby and our nurse shared a room at the rear corner of our apartment. On Bridey’s nights off, she went home to the Bronx where she kept a small flat. Our sister would rap softly on the wall, which was Jon’s and my room, and whimper softly, “Rich or Jonny, come.” She didn’t like being alone, but we were forbidden to visit her. She was ostensibly being trained to lose her fears so she wouldn’t end up like me.
I would tiptoe down the hall, slowly turn the handle and open the door. I’d kneel by her bed, make jokes, cuddle her, hold her sweaty hand, and tell her stories. These were what she and I called “rescue missions.” Often I’d enact shadow cartoons on the ceiling, making animal shapes with my fist and fingers—rabbits and foxes in the dim light of the courtyard. This was Squizzle Drip, the baby I once tumbled with in the park and pulled on a sled, the lone innocent in our cabal.
In the midst of my puppet show one night—my whispering having inadvertently gotten too loud—my mother was on me like a rabid dog, mauling my back through my PJ top. With hysterical shrieks, she chased me back to my room.
Her appearance was supernatural and hideous, blows on my shoulders while I imagined her still asleep. By then Daddy was awake and chose to bombard me with epithets until the walls shook. This was overkill even by Towers family standards, but they actually believed I was making her more susceptible to fear by comforting her.
In my attempts to win over my siblings, I was undiscourageable. Inexplicable surges of good will put magic in the air, as something leprechaun-like flowed into 8C’s leaden chamber, an autonomous power and glee penetrating even its bastille. I imagined I could set everything right, reverse our troubles in one fell swoop. I knew, of course, that that was impossible; everyday I experienced the actual depth and entanglement of our situation. Yet I found myself bubbling with empathy and gratitude, and I wanted to turn the mood into something lasting.
When both our parents were off the premises and neither Jonny nor Debby was watching, I laid out treasure hunts: successive clues scribbled on pieces of paper and stuffed into hiding places (the metal rim of a lamp shade, a keyhole, the top of a table leg, the crook of a statue), each providing a hint to the next, and so on, until the grand prize, a present I bought for the winner.
My most beneficent lark was a surprise party. At Cushman’s Bakery I’d buy serrated cupcakes with lemon or chocolate frosting plus a container of ice cream and smuggle these into the house. Then I arranged them on the table with simulated elegance, a paraody of a party converging with the party itself.
“Happy no one’s birthday!” I shouted euphorically.
They dropped whatever they were doing. Debby would prance in delight and, as we gobbled our treats, Jon and I would tell her outré stories of the past, like the time we followed the wrong woman home from the fish market. Our sister was astonished: “God, Mom was even worse. You guys got to see all the good stuff!”
We were recklessly blasphemous, calling her the “Wicked Witch of Central Park West” and the “Ice Queen,” Debby’s precociously brilliant sobriquet. Afterwards, we did the dishes together, tossing plastic plates and cups acrobatically from sink to wiper to putter-away.
We were such great friends then, and there was such promise in our togetherness that a shred of it might have stuck, but our roles were as subterfuge and interchangeable as Colonel Mustard and Mrs. Peacock in the game of Clue, our true alliances undisclosed even to ourselves. Under pressure they would tell on me, every last thing I said during our powwows. They never intended to; they always swore loyalty to our trio, but Mom was an enchantress and she could wring or entice a confession as she wanted. It was decades before I learned the full extent of their betrayal.
From our new location on the West Side Dr. Friend was only four blocks away, so I began seeing him at odd hours, usually seven at night. Taking a break from homework, I grabbed a jacket and slid away, making as soft an exit as possible.
In a cross-breeze of cherry-blossom petals, I traipsed along Central Park West. The moon was above the City and I was on Fabian’s incomparable quest. Even if Dr. Friend was a mercenary, I was a worthy cipher and we were engaged in a mission that transcended his fee. In a few moments life would loosen its grip and became its own daffy topic. I would throw off strangleholds, break out of ruts, roam unencumbered among the week’s events, witnessing them as something else—actions of my hapless self.
Dr. Fabian had originally characterized psychoanalysis as “a method of learning why one had certain feelings and behaved in particular ways.” We were, he said, bound in habits by forgotten events.
I pictured Sigmund Freud then as an immense arcane system, towering above me like the Parthenon in which I pictured Horace Mann before I went. The founder embodied the infinity and wonder I felt emanating from my own existence. (“You had such an advantage,” a Horace Mann teacher told me. “You got to see the psychiatrist as magician at the only time such a thing could happen—the beginning of your life.”)
The demons I had brought to the office in the West Village overwhelmed me with their omnipotence and fathomlessness. Then through Fabian’s intercession, they had taken on denomination. They were still shadow figures in an abyss—just as grim and treacherous—but I had confidence he knew (or at least suspected) the manner of thing they were. Ultimately, if I reached a crossroads of desperation and implored him, he would break his pact with the oracle and spill the beans.
Dr. Friend made it clear he didn’t know and never would. There was no pot of gold; there was in fact no rainbow. The spooks and phobias were my own, as stubborn and insoluble as I was, as life itself. “You expect to leave here someday with the solution,” he said one day, “but, in this business, cure is called termination. When you feel able to end this relationship, that’s when you’re well.”
On my way home from baseball practice one afternoon, I told a teammate, who also had trouble hitting, that my problem was psychological. “I’m afraid of what the ball represents.”
“What do you think it is with me?” he retorted. “Just because you go to a psychiatrist doesn’t make you any more psychological than anyone else.” My peers had finally caught up to me.
I realized something else too: it was time to take leave of the baseball jinni. At this level, my calling was the mythology of line drives, not their athletic accomplishment.
Rodney had entered Horace Mann the previous year, and I got to know him in the camera club. He was its most elite and vocal member. He subscribed to the two major photography magazines and brought current issues to meetings where he analyzed elements of prize-winning photos, turning the rest of us into pretenders and novices. He wanted to strike gold with his Rolliflex, so he stayed abreast of contests and deadlines and regularly proved the mettle of his Franke & Heidecke lens by resolving random stone walls on fine-grained Pan X film. Then he printed them for every morsel of contrast and grain. Neither a member of the intelligensia nor a major jock (though he did run track), Rodney held his status by oratorical authority and a James Dean look, a persona he played to the hilt by cultivating a sneer and slouch and greasing his hair straight back from a broad forehead. He had a dense solid body with penetrating, occasionally wild eyes. At Horace Mann he was an anomaly: the embodiment of nasty charm.
I don’t remember when I become infatuated with Rodney, for I knew he was special the moment I saw him. Thereafter I insinuated myself into his company at every opportunity. I used our shared history seminar with Mr. Clinton as an excuse for discussing assignments. We gradually became good enough friends for him to risk candor. My dressing, he confided, was abominable. “It’s because your mother buys your clothes. You look like someone dressed by a mother.” He was right. I had long suspected that she went out of her way to make me look dippy.
Thereafter Rodney tried to upgrade my fashion as well as educate me in the ways of the world. He was doing me a favor, he said, teaching me to act cool, not be a twerp.
Inspired by his wardrobe critique, I visited Saks on my own and came home with black-and-white checked jackets and powder-blue shirts of soft cotton like his. I imitated his dabs of Brylcreem and slicked down my hair. My mother was as amused as she was aghast. I had touched her 1940s funny bone—sarcasm was her main mode of humor. “You think that’s handsome? You’re making a spectacle of yourself, drowning in lard. What are you, some kind of greaseball now? Gonna rob a bank? And look at how you’re dressed! Checkered tie and striped jacket! Gray slacks and brown socks! No one in the world wears gray and brown together.”
I was on my way out the door to catch the subway to school as Bob came to observe the latest dust-up. He commented dryly, “Some of the best dressed men in the world wear gray with brown, Martha.”
“He’s not one of the best dressed men in the world!”
One Friday afternoon Rodney invited me home, straight on the bus from Riverdale to Yonkers—no parental prearrangements, no PJs or change of clothes. I was old enough for that kind of prerogative: fifteen. I immediately called Dr. Friend to cancel my appointment. I expected that he would share my delight, but he only reminded me that my father would still be billed. “I’m at Rodney’s!” I enthused.
“I’ll see you on Tuesday,” he said drily—no acknowledgment of my pluck.
As Rodney and I studied together in his room that afternoon, I felt like a character in my own fantasy. We ate dinner with his parents, then walked to a movie like real teenagers. This was an intimacy I had dreamed of with Jeffrey, dabbled in with Steve for a day. We lay in beds on opposite sides of his room and talked past midnight—teachers, girls, summer camps, pranks. Just as I thought we were about to doze off, he lowered his voice for a segue of intimacy and confessed his string of sexual successes with an older woman who found him attractive. This was a caliber of derring-do no one in my circle had claimed; it was also unprecedented candor from another guy. I felt a tumult of conflicting emotions: awe, envy, gratitude, pride at our friendship, shame at my deficiencies. I was like an eighteen-year-old’s little brother, not daring to identify with him because his station was so elevated.
Rodney’s matter-of-fact tone implied that he wasn’t bragging, just being straight because I had earned his trust. When he finally yawned, “Hey wow, goodnight,” I sank into sleep and awoke to country morning: the smell of bacon and birds chirping in the trees.
As we were getting dressed, me in the slacks and shirt I had worn the day before, Rod made an out-of-the-blue promise that if I came to camp with him next summer, I would meet a lot of girls and have a good time. The implication was obvious, but he voiced it anyway: “We don’t just steal panties there. We have real raids.”
Camp Wakonda in the outer reaches of the Adirondacks was owned by the parents with whom I had just supped. The rest of the year his father was a high-school principal in Brooklyn and his mother taught grade school in Rye.
A month later, I came back home with Rodney, this time having packed a toothbrush and change of clothes. His parents were ready with a slide show. It took only a few shots to see that Wakonda was Chipinaw’s antipode. It had minimal athletic facilities; instead, a bistro-like hall featured a variety of social events, each of them enticingly depicted. It wasn’t an arts camp like Buck’s Rock either; it was a teen country club. By the end of their pitch I couldn’t imagine going back to my follies with Jay and Barry. Rod’s parents might have produced a dog-and-pony show, but I would have followed their son to the North Pole.
My mother preferred to keep her flock together, and she pointed out that my father wouldn’t allow such a switch anyway—the camp wasn’t kosher and also he didn’t know the owners. When I raised the matter with him she turned out to be correct.
“But you’re not kosher,” I protested. “We eat bacon and shrimp.”
“That doesn’t matter. It’s in our private home. The appearance is what counts.”
However, Aunt Bunny thought it was a wonderful idea for me to strike out on my own. Since she was sending Michael and James to a non-Jewish camp in Maine, she didn’t see why I had to be held to a higher standard.
“What is it, Paul? Is he the only Grossinger in this family, so he alone gets to suffer?”
Not only did he give in but, when the time came, he drove me to the Adirondacks himself, stopping at a couple of resorts along the way to schmooze and talk shop. It was our first father-son junket, and I loved arriving with Paul Grossinger, owner of the Big G., president of the New York State Hotel Association. We were greeted by proprietors of lesser establishments and given tours of their grounds. I got to listen in on regional trade plans, how to stop unions, and other gossip. Then, back in the car, PG encouraged questions (and compliments) and responded with lengthy discourses on the future of the Catskills.
One look at Wakonda made me wonder if I had seen pictures of a different camp. The bunks were bare-bones shacks, playing fields nonexistent or in disrepair. Weeds grew up through the tennis court’s clay, and part of its net was torn, the hem hanging loose. On the ballfield, second and third base were missing—pentagonal patches where they had once been—and the backstop had basketball-size gaps in its wire. Color War would have been ludicrous here.
On a hill near the dining room sat the fancy nightclub with its Coke machine and jukebox. Full of anticipatory razzing, our bunk made the trek the very first night. Girls clustered along the far wall, as the juke box blared away. I stayed by the side, telling myself that I was getting my bearings. Four or five songs played while I stood mesmerized.
Rodney strode across the room. “Hey, man,” he called out ahead of himself, “this isn’t the way it works. Nothing’s going to happen if you park yourself. You’ve got to find a likely candidate and dance with her.”
“I don’t,” I demurred, “see any likely candidates.”
He looked around, then pointed at a crowd, “How about her? That bird over there.”
At first I couldn’t tell whom he meant, but when my eyes fell on the chosen girl, she was raised to instant charisma by his regard.
“Look at those tits.”
I grimaced but maintained contact with his bravado.
“Now, go ahead.” Mission accomplished, he returned to chatting up the raven-haired beauty he had selected.
The music played “Dream Lover” and then the music played “The Battle of New Orleans”; still no other guy approached the one Rod had pointed out. She was wearing a tight sweater, swaying to the music. Now that he had highlighted it, I couldn’t keep my mind off her obvious bustiness. I wondered why he had passed on her, designating her my speed. She seemed way over my head. Plus, girls were too serious a matter for charity—well, maybe she was too stout.
I waited until waiting was unendurable and then, on the next slow song, I walked over and asked her to dance. She nodded, smiled, and we walked to the center of the room. I placed my arms around her, and we seesawed in a square while exchanging talk like “Where do you go to school?” and “Oh, so you’re Rod’s friend…. ”
Her name was Phyllis, and she came from the Bronx where she went to public school. She was amazed when I told her about Grossinger’s. After the record was over she returned to her group, and I sat down on my side. Rod, whom I had observed watching me the whole time, came across the room and played mentor to the hilt.
“I told you I was going to teach you how to act if you came to Wakonda. Now here’s your first lesson. You’ve got to hold your partner really close. Girls don’t think you like them unless they can feel you up against them, your hand full, like this—” he flashed a quick open palm “—and going up and down their back like this. Then, after the dance, you sit down with her. It’s not tag team.”
I found him crude and boastful, and I wasn’t used to translating desires into strategies. Yet I couldn’t articulate a credible alternative. What did I want to happen and what was I willing to do to accomplish it? I hadn’t had success doing things my way—that led only to fantasies and daydreams—so I waited out two fast dances for the next slow one: “I’m Mr. Blue-oo-oo-uh-oo / when you say you love me…. ”
Melding with Rodney’s gumption, I got myself back to Phyllis’ spot. I approached her, our eyes met. I asked, she nodded. As we walked to an open area of the floor, I put my arm hesitantly on her waist.
I had never danced close—neither Viola Wolfe nor Dave Hecht permitted it—but I saw everyone else doing it and I realized it would happen if I just moved my hand to a different place on her back. By that elementary gesture I fell into total intimacy. Her breasts grazed my chest, a friction I had never felt before. My penis grew hard, as a charge ran up and down my whole being. What if she could feel me? Holding her close was my only assurance no one else would. This time we said nothing at all. I could hear my heart beating. My throat was dry and becoming sore.
Now she moved her hand along my back the way Rod had instructed. Yikes! This was it! In my mind I reprised Mel Allen’s voice: “That ball is going, going…. ” I tried to picture Mickey Mantle’s homers, one after another into the stands, deep into the bleachers, far back, against a pale sun; Bob Turley’s fastballs, launched again and again out of his big easy pitching motion: a combination of play-by-play with deepening baseball images. These represented the old rhythm, the familiar grace of a childhood suddenly gone.
For the next several nights I danced with Phyllis and sat by the side talking with her. She told me about her school life, her parents, past summers at Wakonda. The real event was the dancing, and I learned from other guys to wear a large sweater to hide excitement.
After a few days I wasn’t the only one asking Phyllis to dance. My rival was Bobby Sackett. He was my loudmouth bunkmate, so I knew that he wanted to be a dentist like his father because he thought it would make him rich; his only other ambitions in life were to own a motorboat and a sports car. He regularly beat me to the club to get a jump on the dance card. If he was late, he promptly cut in on me and then monopolized Phyllis. In order to recapture her company I had to walk over to where they were sitting and invite her to dance from scratch. When I questioned her about this arrangement, she told me that we were both her friends, she didn’t favor either of us—which I couldn’t understand. I had little personal confidence, but Bobby Sackett had the visage of a crocodile and was an obnoxious ass as well. Back in the bunk he talked about Phyllis boorishly, in fact only her breasts, usually the nipples, and always in the most vulgar language.
But how clean was I? Though I said nothing I would lie in bed imagining reaching inside her sweater and touching her, or having her pull her sweater over my head and letting me lick those nipples. I would feel my erection pushing to the end of possible space.
On his home court Rodney grew ever more despotic, never deigning to join us in board games or softball, compulsively primping with a comb before the mirror as if he were Kookie Byrnes on 77 Sunset Strip. It was almost diabolic the way he combed and recombed his black strands with Brylcreem, putting on layers of aftershave lotion and doing fake karate leaps half-naked, landing with his hand around his jock and a kiai-like shout—purpose, even tone, unclear. What did he think a man was? What kind of man did he want to be, did he think any of us should be?
On the pretense of helping his father do maintenance he prowled the girls’ camp with self-appointed authority, plucking sweethearts effortlessly. He used the darkroom for his trysts, mainly with Harriet, the first night’s damsel, an Indian-complexioned girl from Montreal with a sad, profound face. He didn’t talk about much else—it was girls or Pan X enlargements.
Our rapport had evaporated, our good times a million miles away. I couldn’t imagine what I had seen in him, he was obviously a lunkhead. I had invented and aggrandized him even as I had demoted and discarded Billy. Commuting heroes and cads, I was my mother’s son.
Rodney and I had one serious confrontation that August. He heard that a dog had treed a cat in the woods and ran to get his Rolliflex to catch the action. Moments later I heard too and came right behind him. He carried a tripod and set it at the base of the tree. As I arrived he exploded at me. “This is a prize-winning shot, you asshole. Get outa here. I’ve had enough of your fucking stealing my ideas.”
I ignored him for the rest of the summer. He was easy to give up; he had become the enemy.
It was now Harriet who beguiled me. In my fantasies she was the one I rescued, as I reclaimed my spaceship and set the old opera in motion. She and I built a house and sat out at night on our farm in another solar system, the Earth’s sun a star in our sky.
From dozing I was awakened by a creak of doors and whispers. This was the fabled raid. A bunch of girls had made it past the lax guards, and they quickly matched up with guys. I could hear them making out, giggling. I had no idea whether Phyllis was there, but the sounds of making out were disturbing. For all the gossip, I had never been in a room where “it” was happening. I pulled the covers over my head and burrowed deep in my romantic innocence.
The proximity of attainable sex should have emboldened me, but I was chastened by people my age making animal-like sounds. Plus I didn’t relish competing with a pompous creep for Phyllis’ affections. Bobby was too showboaty and gregarious. I wanted out of his idiot crosshairs. I hated how he pretended to savor our rivalry as much as her company, posing dumb challenges to keep it going. Every time I danced with Phyllis he went through a charade of allowing me a certain quota of time before cutting in. Back at the bunk he liked to tally how much he was winning by, but he’d always add, as if genteelly, “Of course, we’ll let her have final say.”
By then I didn’t know if I cared about Phyllis that much or saw her as a person beyond the force of my desire, which at times seemed so overwhelming it would dissolve me. The trouble was, I was also offended by her presence, by the debauchery of my attraction to her more than anything in her personality or style. She was pleasant and ordinary enough, maybe a bit gross. But I didn’t like her flaky temperament and contrived ethicalness, her severe countenance when viewed at a certain angle, as if she were already an old lady. In an involuntary twist one night when I was fantasizing making out with her, she turned into a wrinkled crone like the sneezing baby of Wonderland who became a pig in Alice’s arms. Phyllis was as repugnant as she was alluring—now young and erotic, now a harridan and hag.
I couldn’t help it. I was tending my own changeling shadow. Because I didn’t dote on Phyllis like Joan Snyder, she became, in lieu of a muse, the exemplar of my kinkiness and guilt. Half the time I couldn’t bear to meet her eyes as we danced and gabbed, to risk having her read my thoughts, to watch her watching me watch her and guess my motives and real opinion. I preferred my chaste daydreams and idealized trysts with Harriet.
One night, I grew irritated enough to ask Phyllis to promise to finish our dance.
“Not if Bobby cuts in.”
“Well, would you rather dance with him? That’s okay with me.”
“Why don’t you cut in on him?”
I shook my head at the stupidity of this game. When she responded to his tap a moment later, I turned and left the hall. It was Bobby who went on the next raid. He returned boasting of total triumph. I didn’t believe him, but I also didn’t care.
Near the end of the summer Rodney surprisingly asked another girl, not Harriet, to the Wakonda prom. It was Karen, whom we collectively had come to regard as the sexiest woman at camp. Not a girl—a dame. Tall and lissome, she wore skimpy blouses, talked like a starlet, and strolled casually with her whole body in motion. She seemed quite aware of how sexy she looked and wanted everyone to know it. “What a bod,” I overhead a counselor say. “Now that’s one fine piece of ass.” Her face was pale and Cleopatra-like, and she smelled of spice. Although a camper, she dated counselors, and gossip had her sleeping with more than one.
She reminded me of Jayne Mansfield, whom I had met recently in the family section of Grossinger’s. Accompanied by her agent George Bennett, a former Grossinger’s publicist, she enthused about riding on an elephant in New York the day before—then admitted how little she liked it “but Georgey set me up so I had to follow through.” Then, patting me on the head, she said, “What a cute little boy!” Back at Horace Mann, guys asked exactly which strands of hair. They wanted her direct transmission. (“I’m not surprised,” a friend remarked years later. “It’s not every day that one gets Shaktipot from Jayne Mansfield.”)
Karen was dark-haired, sleek, certainly not buxom—not at all like Jayne in looks or presence—but she exuded the same bombshell energy.
“And she’s fast,” Rodney announced to his fans in the bunk. “She gives.”
The moment when I could have appeared out of the blue and asked Harriet to the prom passed in a twinkle. A caustic, runty kid nicknamed The Bug must have had his eyes on her too because he found her at once, invited her, and won her pledge to go with him. I was astonished. He didn’t come up to her shoulders and hadn’t been to the social hall all summer, but he kept saying he was going to get inside her pants. By challenging such comments, I ended up in a fistfight with him. We wrestled on the ground until counselors pulled us apart.
Back at the Hotel I sat in the den and told Aunt Bunny my tales of the summer. “I feel badly for you,” she said, “but you certainly make it into a great story.”
She had her own news: she had hired a teacher from the Liberty public school to live in the smaller guest room because Uncle Paul wasn’t around enough to serve as a father. “Your brothers need more male discipline and companionship,” she explained. “In this permissive environment they are getting out of hand.”
Jerry MacDonald was a former semi-pro shortstop, and ten minutes after I met him I thought he was the greatest guy ever. A marginally chubby young man with the sweetest of classic Irish faces, he continued to slay me with his playful disposition and cheerful laugh on top of feigned bafflement at local characters and high jinks. He knew how to be simultaneously fun-loving, courtly, and modest at Grossinger’s, not an easy trifecta.
We spent our first afternoon together on the ballfield, hitting fungos. I had never played with anyone that good before, who hit the ball so high and far and put such zing on his throws. “You’re not too bad yourself,” he volunteered generously.
“Yeah, but you came down from a higher league.”
“Pretty funny, but I’ll take it.”
Afterwards I led him on a tour of the grounds.
“This is some kind of place for an old Celtic ballplayer to end up,” he said with a grin. “When do I get to wake up?”
At Christmastime Wakonda held its winter reunion at a studio in downtown Manhattan. I took a break from Saturday homework and rode the IRT down Broadway; from there I walked to the address on the invitation. It was an indifferent social hall midtown, the sort of joint I regularly strolled past without notice. I spent an hour in the crowd, munching cookies, drinking sodas, bored. After reminiscing with a few acquaintances, I was on my way out when I got tapped on the shoulder. I looked around … it was Karen. She was wearing a Wakonda T-shirt and had on very red lipstick. “Richie,” she said, speaking my name though I had never spoken to her, “guess what? I’m going to Grossinger’s on Washington’s Birthday. Are you going to be there?”
“Yes,” I managed. There was no other answer possible. But I had never gone there that weekend. It was my mother’s birthday.
“Good. Then I’ll see you.”
What to do? I pleaded with Aunt Bunny. I told her I couldn’t explain why but I had to come. A week later she let me know that a driver would be there to pick me up on Friday.
As for my mother, she had written me off and, to my relief, was paying no attention.
For two whole months I wove fantasies. I tried to resurrect the scent of Karen’s perfume in my mind, the slink of her torso, her red lips. In reverie I would hold her, undress her. There was no way to contact or release the sensation—it was as unerring as it was unendurable.
When I told Dr. Friend, he asked again if I had masturbated.
“I don’t know how to.”
“There’s nothing to know. You get hard. You keep rubbing. You ejaculate.” His candor and lack of sentiment were unsettling.
“But I don’t,” I protested. “Nothing happens. It gets hard; then it gets soft.” I turned to face him and cast a pleading look.
He smiled enigmatically. He wasn’t going to tell.
But he made me curious, so I would lie against the back of the bathtub with the door locked, chin just above water, think of Karen, get an erection, and then rub harder. I would try to imagine her more exquisitely, invoke more intimate postures and activities, give her seductive words.
Clearly I was missing something.
When the car left me off at Grossinger’s, I went straight to the reservation desk to check the guest list.
Unbelievable! She was there!
I dressed up and headed over to the Main Building. The dining room was packed. In recent years I had stayed away from night activities because I hated the dressy formality and ramped-up gala atmosphere. It was a stage for extroverts and, since I was automatically a public figure, I drew all too much attention from waiters, relatives, and pesty guests who knew who I was and wanted to greet me. Tonight I moved quickly and pretended I wasn’t me, not acknowledging callouts of my name. At the spinning rack of names I located her table.
“Hey, what! Looking for girls?” snapped the assistant maître d’ all too presciently.
“Nope.” And I wasn’t looking for girls anyway. I was looking for this one person … and she wasn’t at the table she was assigned to …. and I was too bashful to ask the adults if any were her parents.
After dinner I searched the lobbies again, hoping I would see Karen, hoping I wouldn’t so that I could go home and talk baseball with Jerry. Too late! I caught sight of her in a long white dress, standing by the dining-room entrance. I felt a dizzying rush. Each step in her direction increased a roar in my brain so that I hardly knew what I would do when I got there.
She greeted me enthusiastically but said that we should make a date for the morning because she had to meet her cousin. She stood there, taller than me, smiling bewitchingly. I turned and sprinted back to the house. Outside in moonlight, I fired stones at a telephone pole. My hits echoed like line drives.
In the morning I went straight to her table. Getting up from breakfast, she said, “Lead the way.” We circled the downstairs lobby to the indoor-pool building where, through its giant observation window, we watched an underwater landscape of swimmers, some comically flailing, some diving in trails of bubbles like seals, most of them headless bodies thrashing in billows of swim wear. I showed her how to see a full rainbow by looking straight up through the glass. That was a hit. Then, at her request, we got paddles and played ping-pong at one of the tables by the pool window, not keeping score. I chased an elusive puff to the wall and had it bounce back past me—the volley itself was a blur.
After ping-pong we went to the ice rink, where she struggled along the rail while I sailed through the crowds, waving or smiling each time I passed. Though my trajectory was caused this time by attraction, my orbit was the same as with Billy. I knew that it was wrong but, as much as I wanted to, I couldn’t bring myself to take her arm. Not only did I lack the poise and audacity, I couldn’t handle the pulse of my own energy. We went from the rink to the toboggan, then the ski slope.
As ordinary activities gradually filled hours together, my fantasies came to feel absurd. Karen wasn’t Rodney’s living centerfold; she was just a mature teenager. There was a younger part of her with whom I could be pals, as we cruised my home turf and I led her and her cousins through secret passages to the kitchens where we begged cookie samples. I doubted that she had slept with Rodney, let alone counselors.
We watched the afternoon’s ice show together … and then she was gone, off to dinner and the nightclub with her family. I trudged back to the house.
“What’s up, Richard?” asked Jerry.
“Girls,” I said, shaking my head. “Don’t even ask.”
“I know. Don’t I ever know!”
In the morning Karen was magically transformed, a coquette again: aloof, preening, red lipstick, slinking as she walked. I was instantly hooked, thrown back into salacious desire (“Don’t go home, my little darling; / please don’t leave the party yet …,” always the song for these moments). Her pose seemed so obviously intentional. Had she changed her mien or was it my wild imagination? I had lost all bearings. I couldn’t read her demeanor and didn’t begin to understand our yo-yo.
“Richie, I missed you last night after dinner. We had such a good time in the Terrace Room!” What was she saying? What did she mean? She told me she wanted to try swimming in the indoor pool. “Don’t you think I’d look wiggly through the window?”
I said I’d go with her. (“I have waited long for the party, / ’cause I knew we’d finally meet …” The tune drifted in my mind like a striptease: Dun, Dun-Dun-Na / Dun, Dun-Dun-Na…. ”)
“Good. I was hoping we could have some time alone together. I have to go upstairs and get my bathing suit. Come.” She turned and glided toward the elevator, sashaying two fingers my way.
“This is it,” I told myself, and the phrase echoed in my mind: “… is it … is it … is it”—like Mel Allen’s description of a home run, building in tension to something beyond imagination, wordless and final. I paced dutifully behind her, Pip again, all fated long ago. I had been in that lobby a thousand times, but now it was astonishingly luminous and immaterial … I felt it all might float away. I was weak; I had nothing left at core. In her tight pants she swung back and forth. She was too old for me. I wanted to hold her for even a second.
In the upper lobby Nat Fleischer was conducting his hypnotism show and it caught her attention: people in farcical stupors, the audience erupting in laughter. “Oh, look at that!” she cried out, stopping. I felt my tension snap and snag. I stood by her side in bored frustration, watching a person pretend to row a boat in the air, another take bites of a pretend apple. Why had I never noticed how dumb it was, the same gags and stunts, year after year? Nat, do something different; help me! As he held a match under a woman’s hand I tried to think up a way to get Karen propelled toward her room.
Mine was such an unlikely scenario anyway—it had too many moving parts, needed too many fanciful things to go right—but I had locked onto its design and was committed beyond rationality or abjuration. Suddenly her cousin appeared and asked if she wanted to watch a beauty show that was just beginning in the lower lobby. Part of me assumed that Karen was playing out my seduction fantasy; after all, she was Rodney’s alter ego. That part expected her to say no, but she looked at me almost routinely as she shrugged, “I guess we can go swimming later.”
The letdown was worse than any embarrassment. Desperation was leading me nowhere as I somehow induced her to a corner of the lobby. I had not the slightest idea what I would say. She looked at me curiously.
“Can I kiss you … sometime?” I couldn’t believe the thing I had just spoken, that those words had come out me, that my flustered brain had landed on that petition, the summation of all the hope I had invested in her.
She seemed dumbfounded, unable to answer. I left my words there for a second, maybe another, but her face was still a mask, an inkling of confusion, maybe. Then I said, “I’ve never kissed a girl.”
“Ask Rodney. I can’t explain it. I’m a girl.” I didn’t get what she meant, but I knew it was checkmate.
She smiled and turned, leaving the troubling inappropriateness of her response in my mind. I ran full-speed back to the house, tearing my nails into the back of my hand so that there were four red bleeding lines when I arrived. Even with that gesture I couldn’t reach deep enough inside or relieve the tension.
Then one night that spring in the New York apartment I lay in the bathtub imagining the moment in the lobby again, that she had said, “Well, come upstairs to my room, and I’ll show you.” And then…. And then…. I had this hard penis in my hand. I had a slidey bar of soap that I rubbed it against, back and forth. I was thinking … and then the thoughts took over, casting an episode. There were three girls walking toward me … Phyllis and Harriet too. They were shimmying toward me, in fact singing the song Shimmy shimmy coco bop / shimmy shimmy bop … now silently, diagonally, then straight, with terrible and terrific motion, in precise rhythm, oddly expressionless, two steps, then one, two steps, then one, putting me in a trance…. “Don’t go home….” Then there was only Phyllis and her full body and breasts against me… and then she reached me … but she didn’t stop.