Dissident Gardens (45 page)

“Aw, jeeeeeeeez. Will ya look at the two of youse?” Archie’s voice grew tender now, almost a whisper. He could afford tenderness, having won again, winning always as he did. “I gotta wonder, lookin’ at youse there, why
didn’t
youse take in your own grandson?”

Rose didn’t answer. She released the girl, who stepped into the protectorate of Archie’s bulk.

“Was it some kinda objectivation to the whole Quaker thing?”

You asinine ape, I could care less about any religion. But Rose was finished with lines. Let Archie have the last word. She was done speaking aloud to shadows crossing the room, the lashings of the tube’s light and color against the gray inward screen of her longing.

“Nuttin’ like dat should get between family, see? It took a little Jew girl to teach this old dog he had one new trick in him, go figure.”

Applause. Credits.

Was the book about the bull the first book he remembered? If not, then maybe the first on whose glossy cardboard jacket the boy’s fingerprints were the first fingerprints, the first whose pages he softened into use by himself. Perhaps there had been some soiled floppy picture books in his room in the commune. Likely so. He’d never remember exactly. Other books encountered at Public School 19, or the library, all beaten to submission by innumerable children before him, cats, bears, tugboats, steam shovels, Sneetches, anyhow nothing making much impression. His mother read aloud to him from her battered Heritage wartime edition of
Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass
; he held on to this fact clearly because Stella Kim later visited and brought him that book, along with other keepsakes of Miriam. But the book about the bull had traveled with him to boarding school, been clung to like a security blanket, a minor embarrassment worth enduring when others had moved on to boy detectives and boy scientists and comic books and even stashes of
Playboy
, an embarrassment endurable because he was “the youngest” there at Pendle Acre even when he was no longer the youngest.

To be understood that way, as official baby brother to the entire school, was Sergius’s special dispensation. Long before he could grow old enough for it to be questioned, the boy’s parents were dead, so anyone who’d have otherwise mocked him for retaining the book
about the bull was thwarted. At some other school, who knew? At kindly Pendle Acre, mockery died with Tommy and Miriam. It might be supposed—by the other students and by his teachers, by the resident advisers, by the headmaster—that the book was a talisman of his dead parents. Yet in fact, unlike the
Alice
volume, which he’d keep untouched on his shelf, the book about the bull wasn’t a keepsake of his mother, or of his parents generally. It had nothing to do with them. It was a talisman, instead, of the boy’s single encounter with Santa Claus.

His birthright: full hippie and half secular Jew. Given that, and with Rose’s withering contempt for all ritual and ceremony lurking somewhere in the background, Christmas, for the boy, didn’t exactly loom large. No one indulged him, the only child in the house full of adults. It wouldn’t have occurred to them. In the Seventh Street commune the mercantile and decorative changes that came over the darkening city in late December made an occasion for exasperation and jokes, for a few temporarily vacant rooms as younger housemates reverted to their distant families for the holidays, and for a few pot-head potluck gatherings. Then for a New Year’s party to sweep it all away.

Tommy and Miriam were historical materialists, maybe. Materialistic nohow. Before he understood the word the boy had learned to despise
property
, a series of injunctions as near to commandments as were ever instilled in him:
Thou Shalt Not Covet the Plastic Junk. Thou Shalt Not Request That Which Is Advertised During Looney Tunes. Expect Not the G.I. Joe, Putrid Icon of Militarism. Demand Not the Sugared Cereal. Thine Blocks Be Wooden
. Old stuff was better than new, less was preferential to more, group belongings superior to anything hoarded. All this cut firmly against Christmas and Santa Claus. The boy’s world, his room, was not so much devoid of toys or books as it was a place toys or books drifted through. These items, handed down and likely to be handed down again, worn into timelessness, were by this loving use cleansed, even if they depicted commercial icons like Snoopy or Barbie, of their polluted nature as commodities. The nearest to an exception? Tommy did like to blow up balloons. With the boy in tow, Tommy would buy balloons at the Avenue C bodega—thirty-nine-cent packages bright enough to bait
children yet not in the forbidden realm of candy or gum or baseball cards—and return to the commune to inflate them, one after the next. The boy supposed the balloons were by definition “new,” since he’d seen them purchased. But they weren’t presents. Weren’t toys, exactly. Weren’t even exclusively a child’s province, for when the rooms grew cloudy with pot smoke the adults played with them, too.

But at the Fifteenth Street Meeting one December night Sergius Gogan met Santa Claus, or someone dressed as him, and was given a present. The Santa Claus appeared in the middle of a Quaker holiday party, gathered the children around him, reached into a sack, and placed it in his hands: something new and belonging to Sergius alone. This unique status was demonstrated by its wasteful wrapping of bright red-and-green paper, which existed only to delight Sergius for an instant, then be torn aside and forgotten.

Inside was the book about the bull.

The meetinghouse, which wore the name of “Fifteenth Street” but bore no relation to the concrete island’s grid, dwelling in a secret gated garden all its own, was Sergius Gogan’s sanctuary. It made a place apart from the lawless excess of his daily life, both in the commune and on Seventh Street, where, while Miriam sentried from a vantage on their stoop, he crept sometimes into the junk-laced lots to encounter Alphabet City’s feral children. Tommy, drifting into Quakerism as a symptom of his peace activism, had with Miriam’s shrugging consent begun taking Sergius along with him for Sunday school. What happened there was more or less impossible to remember even five minutes after it happened: actual Bible study, crafts projects designed to evoke the plight of the Native American, and fifteen-minute sample visits to the meeting for worship, that vast and mysterious room where his father sat with a hundred others to wait in silence for something to enter into them and bring them to their feet to testify, a noble activity regularly interrupted by incomprehensible murmuring speeches on various unrelated topics.

The population there formed an odd mix of young hippies and the Quaker meeting’s decrepit core, who greatly resembled those elderly you’d pass everywhere in the city and never consider at all. Yet it was as though both groups had agreed to blur their differences, the hippies dressing less flamboyantly than Sergius suspected they wished
to, opting for the drabbest colors in their wardrobes, tucking button shirts into their belted jeans, male and female alike banding their long hair; meanwhile, the elderly made concessions from their end, wearing flowery vests and soft shoes, the men growing surprisingly elaborate beards, the women donning chunky necklaces. They met in another middle, too: All were quiet, unstartling, and cloyingly kind. Everyone in the big silent room, no matter how deep in brow-gnarled contemplation, smiled on the children who filtered in and mostly wrecked the atmosphere. The Quaker meeting was where all kinds of adults who might otherwise reveal their ferocious eccentricity, their unpredictability—the old, the strange, the Jewish, New Yorkers of all former intensities—went instead to practice being innocuous. That was what Sergius liked about it.

The Quakers frequently spoke of the Inner Light—“that of God in everyone.” For Sergius this was unavoidably conflated with the notion of a pilot light, the mysteries of which he’d contemplated at the Seventh Street kitchen’s battered, enamel-chipped Kenmore range: the Inner Light a thing by its nature tamped and unsparking. A thing, seemingly, quite capable of leaving the outer surface of that which sheltered it cool to the touch and marvelously undangerous. Miriam encouraged him to understand he didn’t need to stand on sentry: It was pretty much okay to just forget the pilot light was even there! And a Quaker might even be like a stove with no dials for igniting the jets; you’d leave a kid alone with a Quaker in a heartbeat. When no one at the commune was willing to babysit, this was what Tommy and Miriam did, dumping Sergius at afternoon playgroups within the shelter of Fifteenth Street’s high gates, watched over by benign childless meeting “elders” or virginal teenagers with braids and ecology-sign-patched jeans, there to clamber on play equipment in a black-padded courtyard, under the leaf shade of the hidden oasis, eye of Manhattan’s storm.

The Sunday evening before Christmas, Fifteenth Street threw open its doors and served a massive bland dinner for itself and for the local bums. Sergius had learned that his father had a special feeling for bums. These street-corner men might not be as urgently heartrending to Tommy as those on death row, but the death-row men were distant abstractions, unavailable to meet and be offered cigarettes, cups of
coffee, or White Castles from a massive greasy paper sack. So Tommy had volunteered to help serve the men who wandered in for the free meal, also bringing his guitar in case there was a chance to sing. He encouraged Sergius to come along—Miriam as always taking a pass on the Quaker stuff, but you guys go ahead, paint the town red—and it was there that Sergius had been blindsided by Santa Claus.

Sergius took the book aside once he’d opened it, sealing himself from his surroundings, the stringy men shoveling roast turkey and baked potatoes into their mouths and pockets, the other children thronging the man in the red suit, his father now gently strumming his guitar, beguiling music-averse Quakers with an Irish-tinged “Silent Night.” Curled in a chair, Sergius studied what he could of the tale of the calf who became a huge bull and yet refused to do anything but sniff at flowers, even when compelled at swordpoint in an arena of jeering spectators. Then, needing the words, once home he demanded Miriam read it aloud immediately. Sergius’s mother was generous with reading, according, however, to her own priorities, imposing the
Alice
book, or
The Hobbit
, which she’d been grinding him through on a nightly basis, one murky chapter after the next. Sergius wanted pictures in his books—now he had them.

“
Ferdinand
, oh yeah, cool. You know, I used to have this book when I was a kid.”

No
, he wanted to say. It is a new book. It is my book. Not part of your constellation of lodestones, the fog of references it was his legacy to navigate. No. This was given to me by Santa Claus, whom
you
never met. Such sudden anger against her! Had he ever dared before? He touched the smooth clean cover and almost pulled it back from her grasp, but he needed her to read the words aloud to him.

Soon, before he’d learned to read, Sergius memorized and could subvocally incant the whole sacrament of Ferdinand the Bull Who Refused the Bullfight. Ferdinand, who grew strong and handsome and retained the love of his mother, who endured the bee’s sting. Ferdinand, who disdained the feistiness of his peers and the red of the cape, who never relented in his love of peace. Of flowers. He who entered the realm of violence yet stymied its expectations, pacified its livid heart. He who, when greeted with the world’s belligerent invitations,
preferred not to
.

Sergius understood why the Quaker Santa Claus would appear and give him this book: because the world was an arena. Alphabet City. P.S. 19, the Asher Levy School, an arena. Tommy and Miriam—the inconstancy and chaos of their domestic disarrangements and of their haphazard war with history, their hair-trigger availability for marches and vigils, for squattings and occupations—an arena beyond description, one he’d been born inside. The revolving-door population of the commune itself, this bedazzling warren of NYU filmmakers and Okinawan terrorists and sylph-like women in yoga poses, an arena. His grandmother, seething in her dimmed rooms, straightening the Lincoln relics in her kitchen when the boy bumped them, staring at him too coldly, for too long an interval, before clutching him to her sighing bosom, then stage-whispering to Miriam, “The spitting image of Albert? This is what you bring into the world?” An arena unto herself. Uncle Lenny, horrendous mouth stinking of cigars and pickled herring in cream sauce, ogling Stella Kim, berating Sergius’s stamp collection, and scratching his ass—him, too.

The book about the bull was intended to prepare Sergius, twice over. Once, to understand that when he was sent from Alphabet City to the Quaker boarding school in rural Pennsylvania he was being placed, like Ferdinand, in the safe pasture his own essential nature demanded: Sergius was being permitted to quit the arena.

Second, the book prepared him to believe that when Tommy and Miriam flew off to Nicaragua, into the wider and more terrifying arena of violent revolution, armed only with Miriam’s training in the art of passive resistance, that judo maneuver of being
triumphantly arrested
, and with Tommy’s guitar and his musician’s
kinship with the people
, that they would, like Ferdinand, wield the magic armor of nonviolence and return unharmed.