New Moon (45 page)

Out of the same formlessness Betsy had come to claim me. But was she the mother tucking me in, or the mother of my child tucking him in?

At dawn, billboards indicated we had passed into Florida; the landscape was dense fog. Then a faint butter sun bled through, tinting the trees along the tracks, most of them covered with Spanish moss. It was somber but exhilarating. I had never seen such a planet, as it cast its science-fiction glow.

I had my life in front of me, and I knew a girl.

“I’m so excited I’m shaking,” Betsy said from the seat beside me at breakfast. “Do you think Bob’ll get off work? Do you think my car will be there? Wouldn’t it be great if I get to drive my own car home? Thank you for being such a great friend.” She promised she would visit me at our hotel. “You’ll get to meet Bob, and then my family will throw a big party for the whole tour. You’ll get to see my house!”

As the train wound into the Miami station, Bob was waiting for Betsy. She ran into his arms, and he held her against him and swung her back and forth like in a movie. In my mind I chanted ten syllables I had memorized from Shakespeare’s
Corialanus
for such occasions: “The sorrow that delivers us thus changed….” The
perfect voiceover.

The next time I saw Betsy was at the outdoor pool. She arrived with Bob, tall and broad-shouldered, hardly any neck, soft blue eyes and a tough mouth. Swaggering as he walked, he said that he had been looking forward to meeting me. “How are the Yanks doing?” he asked, noting the Miami pickup on my radio.

“They’re losing one-nothing.”

“Great,” he said. “I love to see them lose. But then again, I shouldn’t get my hopes up. They always win in the end.”

“Who do you root for?”

“Me? I don’t like baseball too much. I’m from Detroit originally, so I root for the Tigers. Most of the time I just root against the Yanks. Betsy tells me you’ve got a box behind third base at Yankee Stadium. That’s cool.”

He pulled a beach chair beside me, and Betsy set one on the other side. Then she asked me to tell him about high school.

I seemed to astonish him with even the most commonplace details, so I played the naïf. When he wondered where I went when I dated, I told him I didn’t, so he kept pressing me: “What! There were no girls in the school. You studied all the time!” He turned to Betsy in disbelief, glad he wasn’t involved in such. She smiled knowingly, for we had already performed this duet.

Then he questioned me on whether she had been a good girl on the trip. “Oh, yes,” I proclaimed.

He smiled proudly. “See, she’s turning red. She’s passionately in love with me, and I don’t even know that I can stand her presence. Why, she walked up to me the other day on the corner and kissed me. Now what do you think of a girl who—” She had taken a glass of ice water and poured it on him. Then he said, “You’re a good girl, Bets,” and grabbed her legs. She dove away from him, then underwater. He followed. As she kicked and fought, he called back to me, “She’s a regular tomboy, isn’t she?”

“That’s my hair, Bob,” she said.

“I know. I know. Truce! I’ll let you go.”

Later I sat with her alone by the side of the pool. “You know, Bets, someday I’m going to write a story about this trip.”

“Will I be in it?”

I nodded. “You’ll be one of the main characters.”

“Thank you.”

“You don’t need to thank me. You’re such a great character that there wouldn’t be any story without you.”

Bob had dived in the pool and was surfacing, staring back at us, waiting for her to join him.

“Why?” she asked. “What makes me a good character?”

“You’re part of a theme I’m only beginning to understand.”

“What kind of theme?”

“A sort of ‘growing up’ theme.”

“C’mon,” Bob called out.

“I’m just an immature little girl, and a lazy one at that.”

“You’re growing up in your own way.”

“Bob won’t even let me carry a balloon at a carnival because he thinks it makes me too young and silly. He doesn’t understand that staying a little girl is part of me. Do you, Bob?”

“What?” He came climbing out and strode over with a look of mock impatience. Then he turned to me. “Betsy tells me you can get me Rocky Colavito’s autograph at Grossinger’s.” I nodded. “Tell me, is he a decent guy? Some people say he’s a wiseass and a show-off.”

“My stepmother says he’s one of the nicest of the players.”

“You see that, Bets? Old Bob doesn’t miss.”

They headed to the beach, so I went upstairs and put the game on TV. I watched them out the window, throwing a football back and forth. He sent her out on a long pass. Running through surf, she muffed it but showed good form. Then they disappeared from view. Tony Kubek had just come back from the Army and was in his first game of the season at shortstop. It all seemed fake—the smell of sun-tan oil in our room, even the hallowed call of Mel Allen.

I looked out the window. On a raft some girls and boys played diving tag. “Stafford checks his runners, winds, and fires.”

“Go to hell, Stafford,” I said with a bashful smile. “I hate you.” But I was addressing myself with faux drama, a novelist transcribing his
own lines. I recalled a spring day, cerulean sky outside the windows of Horace Mann where I sat and worked from books piled beside me, no end in sight. For what?

I knew now that Miami Beach was where I clutched the primal Easter egg, the one that my real father had rehidden at the beginning of time. Then I was sent into exile, following my mother into her life. It was too late to change these antiquities now. The hook was in me too deep. I was a castaway forever in my own land. I wrote, “I look upon a sky-blue, rose-red, sun-yellow world that is perfect, that I lost and now lose again.”

The day before the end of our stay in Miami Beach, Betsy invited the tour to her house. We arrived in separate cabs. Her mansion was even more palatial than I had feared—fancy iron gates all around it, grillwork shaped like sleighs, her surname. We followed a long winding driveway to a formal entrance.

For me it was just one more barrier: If I was already eight runs down, bottom of the ninth, it might as well be ten or eleven. Even Grossinger’s was hoi polloi beside the lifestyle signified here.

Betsy answered the door surrounded by two large barking poodles and a smaller one. “Don’t mind the dogs. They’re good buddies.”

“Do we have to go through customs?” Marcia asked.

“Of course not,” she laughed. “Come in and you can put on your bathing suits in that little house across the driveway. Wait. My brother will show you.”

It was as though we had been travelling the whole summer in a dark train to get here, where she had been all along.

Floats and balls were thrown into the pool. Servants were cooking frankfurters and hamburgers; platter upon platter of food arrived. It was pompous and syrupy, and Betsy was inaccessible in the busyness, but I enjoyed being there and watching her.

Later in the day she called me inside to meet a friend of my father. I was in the pool, so I dried myself off, put on my shirt, and walked through the living room. People were dressed in shirts and ties. My body seemed bare and tenuous in that company, but I tried to be polite.

“There was a picture in a frame on a table inside,” I wrote. “It was a photograph of Betsy as a little girl. Her face was a bit awkward, with thin eyes, a half smile.” Then I reached the epiphany of my book: “The wind blew gently, the tree leaves rustled slightly, the flowers dipping and rising in a ripple across the beds. It was that famous warm, humid, sleepy summer. Hers was a face like the face on the rarest baseball card, that you would see in someone else’s pack and then never again because there was only one. You would open pack after pack looking for it, that face, the shade of blue in the sky behind, the home-team uniform.”

I wanted to hold her, hold onto her, have her hold onto me. But I knew that I was leaving her company and returning to what I had been. I couldn’t just grow here in her light like a vine for years on end. Her family would ask me to go away. She would get tired of this object trailing about her. She would want a man, a family, children.

I would have to grow up; there was no other path. Her body was real. In the end if I was to know her I would have to get down in the mud with her and fight it out. And it would be a fight, for I wanted to destroy the false aura that surrounded her, that kept me from her. In time she would have to change anyway, and her light would be different, but her Betsyness, that pathos and joy, would not break down like iron in fire; it was a part of her that would not ever be destroyed. That’s what I told myself. I had to find my own identity before she would reveal hers to me. I had to stop walking the line between idiot prankster and ingenuous Amherst-bound sage.

The following evening we had a last-dinner award ceremony. Afterwards Bob was pointing out Dorothy and Carol. “Now if I was on this trip and didn’t have Bets, that’s who’d get my attention. There’s still one night left and plenty of girls,” he winked.

“None,” I asserted, “like Betsy.”

He nodded agreement. “They don’t come much better. She may not be as pretty as some of the rest, but she’s pretty inside—and that’s what counts. You say she was the nicest girl on the trip. Everybody says that. Everybody around here says she was the nicest girl at Beach.” He shook his head in wonder. “When I first kissed Bets,”
he said, putting his arm around her as she joined us, “I wanted it so bad. I don’t ask no questions ’cause I don’t wanta hear no answers. I just leaned over and kissed her.” He paused. “I love this girl here. Even with football I was never important before Betsy.”

Betsy came to see us off the next morning. Stan and Larry were hugging her, saying goodbye, but I didn’t want to part on their terms. I left the tour and walked five cars to the back, posting myself at the last dusty window. The train lurched sharply and then began to move. My eyes met hers, and I shouted, “Goodbye, Betsy” through the glass.

Actually I said nothing. I didn’t even see her.

I watched Miami, tears pouring down my cheeks, my heart open, staring out into a void, streets sliding mechanically, surreally.

At least I had Betsy looking over me. I thought, “I am coming home with an ally. They can do me no more harm.”

Dressing for the final time in the bedroom Jonny and I shared, I fixed on an oblique ray of sun incising the top of the courtyard, marking the moment, setting it as a sign for eternity. Silhouettes of pigeons purred against parapets. My last breakfast in the Towers family was a quick lump in my gut.

My brother shook my hand with a shy grin. I gave Debby a kiss, hugged Bridey, and approached my mother. She held back tears; yet I had no wherewithal to comfort her. “Just get me out of here,” a voice inside me screamed.

The elevator arrived with a noticeable clunk. “Hold it on eight, Jimmy,” Bob said. “We’ve got a year’s worth of Amherst College gear.” It was superfluous theater, for he had already phoned ahead and Jim was arriving with a rolling cart. Downstairs I helped the doorman and my stepfather load a pair of suitcases, three cartons, and assorted loose items into the trunk of his double-parked car. I had no idea when I would be back, so I took records, record player, ice skates, baseball glove, and my favorite books. (When I next set foot in 8C, I would discover that my study had been all but fumigated, my photo albums, writing drafts, and the assorted souvenirs of my childhood long ago tossed in the trash.)

For my departure from the city of my youth the sky could not have been more robin’s egg blue, the vista of the Park more eerily serene. It was just another day igniting, like all the others here, a blanket of taxis on its avenues, an orange rind of memories in my heart.

We crossed bridges onto turnpikes, up through Connecticut into Massachusetts, tinges of russet in the trees, field flowers mostly blue. I set my mind to the speed of the highway.

Eventually Bob was inspired to recall his own years at CCNY, as he invoked Amherst with reverence: “No Jewish kid from the Lower East Side would have dreamed of going to a real Ivy League school. This shows how far we have come in one generation.”

So far that the issue was meaningless to me. The gap between my generation and his seemed almost a mutation of species; it was a surprise to discover that he identified with me at all. One thing we had left, however, despite harsh words over the years, was our friendship. We were both outsiders to a regime we didn’t understand. Discussing my mother was taboo, but I could mention Betsy and have him know what I meant. After all, we were both guys.

He had a rational, reassuring response: “The first one is always the hardest.”

We didn’t need to ask directions in town; traffic was flowing into one bottleneck. As we turned uphill onto the campus, an officer directed us to my dorm, James Hall, which formed a central quad with three others like it. Across the green was Johnson Chapel. Its white clock tower had been visible above the hills for miles. Now it rang out the hour, a welcoming troll.

On either side of the quad, melees of parents and freshmen carted wardrobes, trunks, hockey sticks, crates of record albums, boxes of books, lamps, stereos, etc., item by item, indoors. After we hauled my things up the stairs of James to the fourth and uppermost floor, we arranged them on the floor of my room. Then my stepfather and I walked around the quad to the War Memorial, a raised granite slab inscribed like a compass and clock. It overlooked ballfields so vast that ten softball matches could have been played on them simultaneously without overlapping. The sun singeing grasstops in late-afternoon gold, it was a stunning vista to the mountains. This was the sort of scenery that had captivated me on my New England tour; now it filled me with awe for what I was about to undertake.

The former Ruben Turetsky took it in slowly and solemnly. I could tell he was wrestling with many overlapping mysteries: me and him, me and Jon, him and Jon, him and Martha, CCNY and Amherst … his own path to the moment. Then we hiked back to his car and, in the fading afternoon, he extended a hand. As ever I felt the ambivalence of opportunity lost. We had done the best we could, and I wished I could erase any lingering awkwardness. He could see I was apprehensive, but he didn’t know why. “You’ll manage,” he finally said. “I’d put my money on you in the clutch.” He reached for the car door. “I envy you, Richard, going to this school.” A moment later he cranked open the driver’s window to call out, “Be a mensch.” And I was alone.

I had one of the few singles. That had been my mother’s idea. When housing forms came she warned, “If you let them assign you a roommate, you could end up with a nut,” and I took her advice. As usual, she was wrong; now I keenly regretted my deference. Just about everyone else was engaged in setting up doubles and triples, getting to know the blokes with whom they’d be living. I sat in a solitary space, unpacking sporadically, hanging on to my old world in a Mets doubleheader on the radio. By the end of the second game I was totally depressed. But here I was, an Amherst freshman—no turning back.

Just before dinner, I was paid a visit by two guys who shared a room down the hall. Sid was a tall, folksy kid from Portland, Oregon—talkative and cheerful. Alan was a poet, his diametric opposite—a husky, sad-looking guy with a scarred face who came from nearby Massachusetts. Our first conversation was at dinner in Valentine Hall, wherein Al confided that he planned to commit suicide someday because he didn’t want to leave an event as important as his own death to circumstance. This seeming folly sent Sid into conniptions. “How could you say such a thing, roomy? I didn’t put ‘suicide’ down on the housing form, you know.”

Al just chuckled. “How do you know what
I
put down?”

When Sid failed to budge Al on ontological grounds he tried to convince him that death wasn’t really an issue now, certainly not
when we were at the beginning of our lives, “We’re young. We shouldn’t be thinking morbidly.”

“Ah, but there you trick yourself,” Al replied playfully. “I certainly hope it’s not an issue, but the crux is—you don’t know when you’re going to be called on to make a decision, so you had better be ready.”

Then we switched to hockey (Sid followed the minor league Buckaroos in Portland, Al the local Springfield team)—and romance (Sid wanted to marry his high school sweetie Barb as soon as he graduated, and he offered a few unrequested bars of their favorite song:
My love is higher than a mission bell (how deep?) / Deeper than a wishing well…. ”;
Al was “still looking”). The next evening Al and I sat in my room, reading our writing aloud to each other—his metaphysical love poems and my narratives of the teen tour.

My room lay almost at the juncture of the two arms of the James “L.” Down the opposite aisle from Sid and Al, it seemed the entire freshman football team and their cohorts were assembling a private fraternity by trading assorted roommates to other floors and dorms for like-minded jocks. On several occasions they asked me to accept a reassignment, but I had just gotten there and, anyway, changing rooms was against the rules. I could tell that my recalcitrance made me a deferred target, and I felt an all-too-familiar embattledness and isolation closing in.

Luckily another event sidetracked them. James Hall was put on quick probation because a dork on the second floor named Marshall Bloom had been caught by a maid with a girl in his room. A gang from the fourth floor retaliated, scattering his belongings, hanging his bed out the window on a rope, and generally trashing his room and filling it with toilet paper. Chipinaw had been minor league.

During orientation week, each of us students was paired with another incoming freshman. The goal was for at least two of us to get to know each other, mainly on a long hike in the woods. My partner was Ken Howard, a towering New York basketball legend who would become a Hollywood actor and portray a coach on
The White Shadow,
a late-seventies/early-eighties sitcom. Years beyond
that, I told him how intimidated I was by him.

“You
were intimidated?” he bellowed. “I’m put with this guy who tells me he wrote a novel already, and we hadn’t even been to our first class. I thought I was out of my league.”

I had forgotten that exchange, but it shows how unconscious I was. I felt like a pipsqueak next to Ken, in more ways than one, but I came off as a braggart. It wasn’t even
that
kind of a novel.

Going to Amherst meant being automatically enrolled in a batch of required courses, something I hadn’t envisaged when applying (sort of like enlisting in the Army without considering that it was an institution for fighting wars). All my classes (except for the one elective I was allowed—Introductory Philosophy) were part of a freshman syllabus that had become a lauded benchmark of American education.

Compared to Horace Mann, the work seemed easy: modest assignments with virtually no memorization. The priority was “analysis.” In history our inquiry began with interpretations of primary-source documents from ancient and Mediaeval times. We moved from the Laws of Hammurabi and Annals of Tacitus through Henry IV at Canossa, money and credit, early European cities, Cellini, Calvinism in Scotland, Machiavelli, and the Incas and Aztecs. In the process we received handouts of laws, speeches, missives, journals, even prayers, and were asked to find their subtexts and protocols—a forerunner of academic deconstruction.

Physics likewise was a course in rethinking the basic laws of nature (with correlative math in another class). We were expected to derive our own formulas as we rolled steel balls down chutes and dropped weights onto carbon paper on the floor.

English was purely a writing seminar—three times a week we turned in papers in which we considered “how one knew what they knew.” The first assignment proposed, “‘I can make my past anything I want simply by thinking it’s so.’ What is your judgment of this remark? Does it not at first sight seem to you a fatuous statement? What is fatuous about it? But is there something in it? What ‘truth’ do you see hinted at?” Another assignment asked, “What is a
lie? Have you ever been told a lie? How did you know it was a lie?”

Years of psychoanalysis had prepared me for such riddles.

Meanwhile the New England landscape—its quaint streets, impinging woodlands, and harbingers of autumn—was far more clamant than school. Only gradually did I realize I was at a place that had no precedent in my life. It wasn’t like school or sleepover camp or even the idealized college I had imagined attending. And once again, I was going through the motions in a daze.

At World Series time I took the Trailways bus through western Mass and Connecticut down to the City to watch the Yankees take on the Giants. Our family had tickets from Bill Stafford on the day he was the starting pitcher.

The first morning in New York I rode a near-empty subway car an hour behind the student rush and climbed the hill to Horace Mann. I walked its grounds like a time traveller—no trace of the Class of ’62 anywhere. At lunch Mr. Clinton invited me into the faculty dining room. While I sat eating and regaling a number of my former teachers with descriptions of Amherst, Mr. Metcalf strolled by. I popped to my feet and pursued him.

“What Latin’re you taking?” he snapped.

I froze. I was starting to say that we had only one elective and I had picked philosophy when he turned his back and walked away.

The next afternoon, Jerry, Aunt Bunny, my father, and I watched the Yanks squeak by the Giants, 3-2. Ex–White Sox ace Billy Pierce matched Stafford in shutout innings until Roger Maris’ crowd-erupting two-run single in the seventh. Jumping to my feet, I added my jubilance to the din. Stafford carried a two-hitter into the eighth, then lost his shutout in the ninth on Ed Bailey’s sudden man-on poke into the right-field seats. Following a visit to the mound from manager Ralph Houk, he got Jim Davenport to fly out to left to end the game. Afterwards we met the Billy by the clubhouse and followed his car to his house in Rye for a barbecue.

For about five minutes I got to stand beside the towering Yankee with my burger and beans. I tried to be cogent as we exchanged
prognoses for the Series. After a while Billy ribbed me, “You care more than me ’bout whether we win or lose. Either way, the season’s over in a week. Then it’s women, not baseball—” checking to make sure his wife was safely out of earshot. Probably not, so he added, “that is, if I wasn’t married to Janice.”

Stafford the ballplayer and Stafford the guy were two different fellows—no surprise there. I had understood that since Uncle Paul presented a nine-year-old to his favorite player. The previous winter when Jerry and I joined Billy at the Grossinger’s bar, I was astonished that he didn’t know the names of half the players on the Kansas City A’s. “But I can recognize them,” he said, “and that’s all they pay me to do.”

Billy had raised an old, familiar dichotomy—girls and baseball. On the night of my senior prom Rod Kanehl got a rare start against the Giants. Without anything resembling a girlfriend to ask, I had ended up calling my Chipinaw tentmate Bud’s sister Sharon. It wasn’t that I felt a romantic draw to her, but the three of us had hung out together at Grossinger’s the previous winter and she was charming, foxy, and sophisticated, an exquisitely etched china doll who ticked like a fine clock with a slight English accent—or something resembling it—though she was pure Long Island. She had floated the idea back in December when my lack of a date came up in idle chatter: “Just ask me. I’m available and a friend.”

As I was getting dressed for the evening, I heard, “Playing first base for New York and batting second, number ten, Rod Kanehl.” After a brief tug of indecision, I slipped my baseball-shaped radio into the orchid box, then transferred it to my jacket pocket once I was in the cab. From then on, two entities pulled my taffy brain in polar directions: a tall dark girl with bright red lipstick in a backless dress and Kanehl’s at-bats.

The evening never got in sync: a procession of antithetical intentions, missed opportunities, stolen chairs, and a legendary class wolf I barely knew flirting and then dancing with my date. As he did, I slipped away to the bathroom to hear (at the precise click of the “on/off” dial), “Now here’s Rod Kanehl, a rookie who’s had himself quite a night. He has a single and his first Major League
home run in four trips to the plate.”