Hocus Pocus (18 page)

As I say, this was news to me.

“Funny thing—” he went on, “it never seemed to hit any of them until they were middle-aged.”

“If I’m not laughing,” I said, “that’s because I got out on the wrong side of the bed today.”

 

 

NO SOONER HAD I returned to our table than a young man passing behind me could not resist the impulse to touch my bristly haircut. I went absolutely ape-poop! He was slight, and had long hair, and wore a peace symbol around his neck. He looked like the singer Bob Dylan. For all I know or care, he may actually have been Bob Dylan. Whoever he was, I knocked him into a waiter carrying a heavily loaded tray.

Chinese food flew everywhere!

Pandemonium!

 

 

I RAN OUTSIDE. Everybody and everything was my enemy. I was back in Vietnam!

But a Christ-like figure loomed before me. He was wearing a suit and tie, but he had a long beard, and his eyes were full of love and pity. He seemed to know all about me, and he really did. He was Sam Wakefield, who had resigned his commission as a General, and gone over to the Peace Movement, and become President of Tarkington College.

He said to me what he had said to me so long ago in Cleveland, at the Science Fair: “What’s the hurry, Son?”

REMEMBERING MY HOMECOMING from Vietnam always puts me in mind of Bruce Bergeron, a student of mine at Tarkington. I have already mentioned Bruce. He joined the Ice Capades as a chorus boy after winning his Associate in the Arts and Sciences Degree, and was murdered in Dubuque. His father was President of the Wildlife Rescue Federation.

When I had Bruce in Music Appreciation I played a recording of Tchaikovsky’s
1812
Overture.
I explained to the class that the composition was about an actual event in history, the defeat of Napoleon in Russia. I asked the students to think of some major event in their own lives, and to imagine what kind of music might best describe it. They were to think about it for a week before telling anybody about the event or the music. I wanted their brains to cook and cook with music, with the lid on tight.

The event Bruce Bergeron set to music in his head was getting stuck between floors in an elevator when he was maybe 6 years old, on the way with a Haitian nanny to a post-Christmas white sale at Bloomingdale’s department store in New York City. They were supposed to be going to the American Museum of Natural History, but the nanny, without permission from her employers, wanted to send some bargain bedding to relatives in Haiti first.

The elevator got stuck right below the floor where the white sale was going on. It was an automatic elevator. There was no operator. It was jammed. When it became obvious that the elevator was going to stay there, somebody pushed the alarm button, which the passengers could hear clanging far below. According to Bruce, this was the first time in his life that he had ever been in some kind of trouble that grownups couldn’t take care of at once.

 

 

THERE WAS A 2-way speaker in the elevator, and a woman’s voice came on, telling the people to stay calm. Bruce remembered that she made this particular point: Nobody was to try to climb out through the trapdoor in the ceiling. If anybody did that, Bloomingdale’s could not be responsible for whatever might happen to him or her afterward.

Time went by. More time went by. To little Bruce it seemed that they had been trapped there for a century. It was probably more like 20 minutes.

Little Bruce believed himself to be at the center of a major event in American history. He imagined that not only his parents but the President of the United States must be hearing about it on television. When they were rescued, he thought, bands and cheering crowds would greet him.

Little Bruce expected a banquet and a medal for not panicking, and for not saying he had to go to the bathroom.

 

THE ELEVATOR SUDDENLY jolted upward a few centimeters, stopped. It jolted upward a meter, an aftershock. The doors slithered open, revealing the white sale in progress behind ordinary customers, who were simply waiting for the next elevator, without any idea that there had been something wrong with that one.

They wanted the people in there to get out so that they could get in.

There wasn’t even somebody from the management of the store to offer an anxious apology, to make certain that everybody was all right. All the actions relative to freeing the captives had taken place far away—wherever the machinery was, wherever the alarm gong was, wherever the woman was who had told them not to panic or climb out the trapdoor.

That was that.

 

 

THE NANNY BOUGHT some bedding, and then she and little Bruce went on to the American Museum of Natural History. The nanny made him promise not to tell his parents that they had been to Bloomingdale’s, too—and he never did.

He still hadn’t told them when he spilled the beans in Music Appreciation.

“You know what you have described to perfection?” I asked him.

“No,” he said.

I said, “What it was like to come home from the Vietnam War.”

I READ ABOUT World War II. Civilians and soldiers alike, and even little children, were proud to have played a part in it. It was impossible, seemingly, for any sort of person not to feel a part of that war, if he or she was alive while it was going on. Yes, and the suffering or death of soldiers and sailors and Marines was felt at least a little bit by everyone.

But the Vietnam War belongs exclusively to those of us who fought in it. Nobody else had anything to do with it, supposedly. Everybody else is as pure as the driven snow. We alone are stupid and dirty, having fought such a war. When we lost, it served us right for ever having started it. The night I went temporarily insane in a Chinese restaurant on Harvard Square, everybody was a big success but me.

 

BEFORE I BLEW up, Mildred’s old friend from Peru, Indiana, spoke as though we were in separate businesses, as though I were a podiatrist, maybe, or a sheet-metal contractor, instead of somebody who had risked his life and sacrificed common sense and decency on his behalf.

As it happened, he himself was in the medical-waste disposa game in Indianapolis. That’s a nice business to learn about in a Chinese restaurant, with everybody dangling who knows what from chopsticks.

He said that his workaday problems had as much to do with aesthetics as with toxicity. Those were both his words, “aesthetics” and “toxicity.”

He said, “Nobody likes to find a foot or a finger or whatever in a garbage can or a dump, even though it is no more dangerous to public health than the remains of a rib roast.”

He asked me if I saw anything on his and his wife’s table that I would like to sample, that they had ordered too much.

“No, thank you, sir,” I said.

“But telling you that,” he said, “is coals to Newcastle.”

“How so?” I said. I was trying not to listen to him, and was looking in exactly the wrong place for distraction, which was the face of my mother-in-law. Apparently this potential lunatic with no place else to go had become a permanent part of our household. It was a fait accompli.

“Well—you’ve been in war,” he said. The way he said it, it was clear that he considered the war to have been my war alone “I mean you people must have had to do a certain amount of cleaning up.”

That was when the kid patted my bristles. My brains blew up like a canteen of nitroglycerin.

 

MY LAWYER, MUCH encouraged by the 2 lists I am making, and by the fact that I have never masturbated and like to clean house, asked me yesterday why it was that I never swore. He found me washing windows in this library, although nobody had ordered me to do that.

So I told him my maternal grandfather’s idea that obscenity and blasphemy gave most people permission not to listen respectfully to whatever was being said.

I repeated an old story Grandfather Wills had taught me, which was about a town where a cannon was fired at noon every day. One day the cannoneer was sick at the last minute and was too incapacitated to fire the cannon.

So at high noon there was silence.

All the people in the town jumped out of their skins when the sun reached its zenith. They asked each other in astonishment, “Good gravy! What was that?”

My lawyer wanted to know what that had to do with my not swearing.

I replied that in an era as foulmouthed as this one, “Good gravy” had the same power to startle as a cannon shot.

 

 

THERE ON HARVARD Square, back in 1975, Sam Wakefield again made himself the helmsman of my destiny. He told me to stay out on the sidewalk, where I felt safe. I was shaking like a leaf. I wanted to bark like a dog.

He went into the restaurant, and somehow calmed everybody down, and offered to pay for all damages from his own pocket right then and there. He had a very rich wife, Andrea, who would become Tarkington’s Dean of Women after he committed suicide. Andrea died 2 years before the prison break, and so is not buried with so many others next to the stable, in the shadow of Musket Mountain when the Sun goes down.

She is buried next to her husband in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. The glacier could still shove the 2 of them into West Virginia or Maryland. Bon Voyage!

 

 

ANDREA WAKEFIELD WAS the 2nd person I spoke to after Tarkington fired me. Damon Stern was the first. I am talking about 1991 again. Practically everybody else was eating lobsters. Andrea came up to me after meeting Stern farther down on the Senior Walk.

“I thought you would be in the Pavilion eating lobster,” she said.

“Not hungry,” I said.

“I can’t stand it that they’re boiled alive,” she said. “You know what Damon Stern just told me?”

“I’m sure it was interesting,” I said.

“During the reign of Henry the 8th of England,” she said, “counterfeiters were boiled alive.”

“Show biz,” I said. “Were they boiled alive in public?”

“He didn’t say,” she said. “And what are you doing here?”

“Enjoying the sunshine,” I said.

She believed me. She sat down next to me. She was already wearing her academic gown for the faculty parade to graduation. Her cowl identified her as a graduate of the Sorbonne in Paris, France. In addition to her duties as Dean, dealing with unwanted pregnancies and drug addiction and the like, she also taught French and Italian and oil painting. She was from a genuinely distinguished old Philadelphia family, which had given civilization a remarkable number of educators and lawyers and physicians and artists. She actually may have been what Jason Wilder and several of Tarkington’s Trustees believed themselves to be, obviously the most highly evolved creatures on the planet.

She was a lot smarter than her husband.

I always meant to ask her how a Quaker came to marry a professional soldier, but I never did.

Too late now.

 

 

EVEN AT HER age then, which was about 60, 10 years older than me, Andrea was the best figure skater on the faculty. I think figure skating, if Andrea Wakefield could find the right partner, was eroticism enough for her. General Wakefield couldn’t skate for sour apples. The best partner she had on ice at Tarkington, probably, was Bruce Bergeron—the boy who was trapped in an elevator at Bloomingdale’s, who became the youth who couldn’t get into any college but Tarkington, who became the man who joined the chorus of an ice show and then was murdered by somebody who presumably hated homosexuals, or loved one too much.

Andrea and I had never been lovers. She was too contented and old for me.

 

 

“I WANT YOU to know I think you’re a Saint,” said Andrea.

“How so?” I said.

“You’re so nice to your wife and mother-in-law.”

“It’s easier than what I did for Presidents and Generals and Henry Kissinger,” I said.

“But this is voluntary,” she said.

“So was that,” I said. “I was real gung-ho.”

 

 

“WHEN YOU REALIZE how many men nowadays dissolve their marriages when they become the least little bit inconvenient or uncomfortable,” she said, “all I can think is that you’re a Saint.”

“They didn’t want to come up here, you know,” I said. “They were very happy in Baltimore, and Margaret would have become a physical therapist.”

“It isn’t this valley that made them sick, is it?” she said. “It isn’t this valley that made my husband sick.”

“It’s a clock that made them sick,” I said. “It would have struck midnight for both of them, no matter where they were.”

“That’s how I feel about Sam,” she said. “I can’t feel guilty.”

“Shouldn’t,” I said.

“When he resigned from the Army and went over to the peace movement,” she said, “I think he was trying to stop the clock. Didn’t work.”

“I miss him,” I said.

“Don’t let the war kill you, too,” she said.

“Don’t worry,” I said.

 

 

“YOU STILL HAVEN’T found the money?” she said.

She was talking about the money Mildred had gotten for the house in Baltimore. While Mildred was still fairly sane, she deposited it in the Scipio branch of the First National Bank of Rochester. But then she withdrew it in cash when the bank was bought by the Sultan of Brunei, without telling me or Margaret that she had done so. Then she hid it somewhere, but she couldn’t remember where.

“I don’t even think about it anymore,” I said. “The most likely thing is that somebody else found it. It could have been a bunch of kids. It could have been somebody working on the house. Whoever it was sure isn’t going to say so.”

We were talking about $45,000 and change.

“I know I should give a darn, but somehow I can’t give a darn,” I said.