New Moon (8 page)

Jonny declared himself a Yankee fan too and picked his own favorite player. So Daddy took us back to Miller’s and bought Yankee caps and pinstriped uniforms. We proudly donned these for our Sunday outings, number 12, Gil McDougald, and number 7, Mickey Mantle, the switch-hitting star.

For years my brother and I routinely carried a Spaldeen and threw it over and under obstacles on the street, widening our range as we hit Central Park. Bridey said we had “ball-itis” because a round object was all that was needed to instigate this behavior. She may not have understood the impulse, but she knew its outcome. Spheroids, however large or small, generated energy fields that ran us around
like marionettes. A marble or rounded gob of Silly Putty cast pretty much the same spell.

The way to our hearts was through baseball, so Bridey would tease us by calling me “Richard McTowers” and Jonny “Whitey T.”—she had a particular fondness for the name Whitey Ford and used it on unlikely occasions. Jon appreciated his nickname and, at its summons, snapped imaginary curve balls for her. We tried to get her more involved, telling her scores about which she cared little. “It’s not an Irish game,” she insisted. “And my kinfolk wouldn’t want me rooting for such as Yankees anyway.”

To her mind, we honored the players like priests, and it was sinful to put so much emphasis on mere mortals. If we waxed too euphoric about a Yankee win, she said things like, “Hush now with your idolatry.”

Sometimes Daddy peered in when we were listening and commented on the game, though he was a Giants fan. He had stock lines, like when Eddie Lopat was having a rough outing: “He’s not fooling anyone today, boys.” We laughed, as though he were Casey Stengel remarking to his bullpen coaches.

One afternoon, Uncle Moe made an appearance, kneeled down right beside us, and requested an immediate update. I told him that Johnny Mize had just missed a pinch homer. Jim Delsing dove into the stands to take it away.

“Did he buy a ticket?” Uncle Moe asked.

I stared back at him without smiling. This was not a trivial matter, and I was hardly over my disappointment.

“Why, he can’t go into the stands without a ticket!”

At home I made up my own games. I would divide cards into nine-man teams, set one into fielding positions on the carpet, the other into a batting order, make one of my “doubles” the “ball,” and play nine innings, with the team of cards at bat taking turns swatting the “ball,” card-face against finger-teed card-edge. An out was when the “ball” landed on another card or near an infielder (from where I could flip it onto a part of the first baseman card—or fail for an error). Players took on distinct personalities, as regions of
rug became sectors of a diamond. Jon’s and my bureaus were the bleachers: home-run territory. Few pleasures exceeded the feeling of a seemingly solid hit floating across my room and landing smack on an outfielder’s card—or grazing the bureau for a Ballantine blast.

During spare moments at Bill-Dave (or whispered at school) Phil and I played the “Initials” game: L.D., outfielder, Indians?; P.S., second-base, Athletics?; A.S., pitcher, Yankees? (We would never miss a Yankee no matter how obscure.) J.O., infielder, Pirates? Though not a Yankee, Johnny O’Brien was Phil’s favorite, the player he imagined and announced himself as, going into the hole at shortstop, making the throw to get the force play with his brother Eddie at second. It was the “O-apostrophe” of their names, not their abilities, that captivated Phil, for neither O’Brien could hold a candle to Bill-Dave’s all-star shortstop.

En route home Phil and I would sit together in the back of the wagon pretending we were Mel Allen and Jim Woods announcing innings, complete with introductions, disclaimers, and Ballantine beer ads. We would go pitch by pitch: “Reynolds winds, checks second; now he comes to the plate … swung on…. ”

We also had a rendition of Lou Gehrig’s legendary speech. I’d speak it, and Phil would do the echoes:

“I consider myself—”

“… consider myself—”

“… the luckiest man—”

“… iest man—”

“… on the face of the earth—”

“… face of the earth.”

Then we applauded wildly, other kids joining in like the 1939 crowd. It seemed strange that, when he spoke those happy words to a full house at Yankee Stadium five years before we were born, Gehrig was dying of a fatal disease—strange too that we replicated them so lightly, taking on the role of the doomed hero. Yet as I performed them, I felt a sense of honor and reverence—a chill down my spine. More than Abraham Lincoln’s “Fourscore and seven years ago …,” it was the most important speech in the universe or at least the most important that I knew.

I arrived at Miss Hazel’s second grade still behind. I could read, but I couldn’t make all the letters in script and didn’t know how to carry over columns in addition and subtraction. I left puddles on the floor, so the teacher sat me apart with newspapers under my desk. I plucked Landmark books off nearby shelves and read them while others worked: the Louisiana purchase, Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain Boys, the Lewis and Clark Expedition, the Wright Brothers, the Panama Canal, the Winter at Valley Forge, Pocahontas and John Smith. These myths became my alternate education as well as my basic map of America to which all later ones had to conform. It is still my phenomenological America, sealed by the Pony Express and a last golden spike joining transcontinental railroad lines from the east and west in Utah Territory.

On the day of the seventh game of the 1952 World Series I felt dizzy, so I was taken to the nurse’s office and sent home. Bridey helped me change into PJs. As cartoon figures danced with oversized letters in my brain, I dozed in and out of sleep.

I awoke with a start in the seventh inning. The Yankees were up 4-2, but the bases were loaded with Dodgers. Bob Kuzava was coming in from the bullpen in relief of Vic Raschi. Eddie Lopat and Allie Reynolds had preceded him: the Yankees’ three main starters all used. I took out Kuzava’s card and reviewed his career. The whole season was on the line, and a journeyman southpaw was about to face mighty Duke Snider and Jackie Robinson.

Then Billy Martin, racing out of nowhere as the other infielders
stood paralyzed, made a lunging catch of Robinson’s infield fly near the mound, a second pop-up in a row induced by the unlikely hero. I cheered out loud. “A great hunch by Casey,” Mel Allen declared. “I was sure it would backfire.”

“Home sick, are you?” laughed Bridey. Ramon, the elevator man, had told her I was playing “World Series hookey.” (He spelled his name R-a-m-o-n, but it was pronounced “Ramone.”)

But if I wasn’t sick, why did I fall into such a whirligig trance and miss most of the game?

One afternoon the principal of P.S. 6 called Mommy in for a conference. He said that I was either brain-damaged or mentally ill. He required a medical affidavit if I was to continue.

What I remember is a day of no school and a trip downtown in a taxi, sportive but ominous. My mother took my arm as we turned the street corner into a hospital-like structure. There a doctor led me down a hall, but, to my relief, he didn’t ask me to take off my clothes or even have an examining table. Instead we sat on opposite sides of a counter where he set before me a series of mazes and puzzles. When I finished solving these he reached into his drawer for a box and, one by one, put down large cards with pictures that I had to interpret for him. I looked at drawings of people peeking around doors, of weird cloud-like houses and groups of men and women doing unexplained things and, as requested, made up stories for them. I viewed rows of faces of strange characters, some with large warts, moustaches, or eyeglasses, and said which ones I’d go out with or wouldn’t. Then he pulled out a page of twisted shapes and asked me to sort them.

Finally I studied a necklace of different colors and shapes of beads, memorized their positions and restrung them. “Perfect,” the doctor acclaimed. “Hardly anyone gets them all.” I emerged triumphant and reported my success to Mommy.

In the session after lunch, there were no games. I was asked to lie on a cot. A nurse taped wires to my head, my life apparently revealed in a code that a needle translated onto a drum. I shielded my mind so that my spaceship and travels would not be discovered.

Years later I learned that the tests showed I was normal but emotionally disturbed. At the time Mommy said only that I would be seeing another doctor. At first I complained because she had scheduled it on my birthday and it didn’t sound like much fun. “Sure it will be fun. Remember how much you enjoyed the puzzles and beads.”

She brought me there on November 3rd, 1952. We took a bus further downtown than I had ever gone. Then we walked along old-fashioned streets, turned into a doorway, and found ourselves in a foyer with fancy chairs.
New Yorker
magazines were piled on a table, so I turned through the cartoons, occasionally asking Mommy to explain one. Finally a door opened; the doctor gestured me in. Mommy kissed me on both cheeks and left.

It was a ground-floor flat, bookshelves up to its ceilings. A window faced Seventh Street. I saw a girl skipping rope, a man strapped to a building washing windows.

His name was Abraham Fabian. He was tall and resembled Abraham Lincoln. I sat in a chair across from him, answered his questions, and gradually warmed to tell him about school, Bill-Dave, and my family. He was cordial and attentive, so I confided the thing that excited me most: my Uncle Paul was taking me out afterwards. When I exited the office, sure enough, Uncle Paul was there, large as life, reading a magazine. “Richard my boy!” he exclaimed. He threw out his arms and invited me into a bear hug. Then he shook hands with Dr. Fabian as though they were old buddies.

“Have a good birthday,” the doctor called as we left.

Outside, we hailed a cab. In a river of green lights the driver tore uptown, then swerved onto a side street and screeched to a stop: Al Schacht’s Restaurant. A doorman led us into a baseball palace—its staircase railings were made of lacquered bats and balls, and all the choices on the menu were puns on players’ names: Dizzy Trout, Ty Corn on the Cobb, and Yogi Berries. I ordered a fruit cocktail on ice and was picking out the sweet cherries when two tall men in suits joined our table. In answer to Uncle Paul’s question, I insisted that I didn’t know these fellows. “Sure, you do,” he kept saying as I shook my head.

Then he threw up his arms and declared with chagrin, “Why, I was told you knew all the New York Yankees. This is first-baseman Joe Collins and catcher Charlie Silvera.” My heart skipped, and I stared again. They were real, the faces from the cards, dressed in suits and ties. No one I knew had ever had
dinner
with one of them.

The room was a bustle of activity and yummy smells. I sat watching balancing feats of waiters, meals sailing out of the kitchen. Uncle Paul ordered everyone steaks and French fries and, while we ate, people came up to shake hands with him and his Yankee friends.

The players were large, like cowboys, and they and Uncle Paul talked adult stuff to each other, never once mentioning baseball. Al Schacht, an old man who was once a pitcher, pulled up a chair and told jokes. After a while the Yankees began to laugh. Then Mr. Schacht rose to greet a cake of baseball decorations and candles. He led the singing of “Happy Birthday,” which even Charlie Silvera and Joe Collins participated in, gazing at me with big grins. I couldn’t wait to get to school the next day to tell Phil.

After my first time at Dr. Fabian’s I was brought there twice a week by a graduate student from Columbia named Neil. Grateful to be rescued from the after-school melee at the Bill-Dave wagon, I pranced alongside my new companion, anticipating our next escapade in the subway. Neil bought me comics, shared his nickels in candy machines, and played “Geography” (the last letters of places providing the first letters of other places you had to supply). If we were early, he took me to a nearby cafeteria, ordered treats, and bought me a puzzle book. We would sit on adjacent stools connecting numbered dots and solving things like “One of these objects is not like the others” and “What’s wrong with this picture?” “Well, the clock has three hands, the table is missing a leg, the dog has the back legs of a rabbit, and the lamp isn’t reflected in the mirror.”

He liked to tease me about baseball being so important. In challenge of that, he invented a game in which he said words that supposedly had nothing to do with baseball and I tried to make up a baseball sentence about each of them. His first two were stumpers:
“paradise” and “florist,” so I said, “The baseball player went to paradise” and “The baseball player bought flowers at the florist.”

He called that cheating but said that it taught us an important lesson. I couldn’t guess, so he told me, “It’s that human beings can’t make up anything that isn’t human.”

Neil would sit in the waiting room while I went inside. Afterwards, if there was time, he asked Dr. Fabian questions about his own studies. Then he took me on the subway home.

Dr. Fabian never said precisely who he was or what his job comprised, but I understood that he was my special ally. He got in on everything, reviewing and correcting my arithmetic and spelling and teaching me stuff I hadn’t understood in class. Sympathetic about hectoring at school and miffed on my behalf about being blamed for everything at home, he mainly wanted to hear about Nanny. Unfortunately, I could remember little except how she reminded me of the cackling witch in
Tubby and Little Lulu.

“But you loved her too,” he submitted.

I considered the notion, then nodded.

From the long line of volumes on his shelf I understood that Dr. Fabian was a spokesman for a man whose name I misread as Dr. Freund because there was a brass plate with that name on the outside of our apartment building. “He lives downstairs from us,” I told him.

“Dr. Freud does?”

I nodded.

He didn’t correct me.

With a deck of cards we played War and Casino and then Hangman, a paper-and-pencil word-guessing game, with stages toward a completed figure on a noose tabbed by lines representing wrong guesses. He also taught me Battleship—a duel of hiding and “shooting” ships by placing them in grids we drew on blank pages and then guessing each other’s coordinates (a foreshadowing of algebraic axes)—then how to fold and tear pieces of paper many times over into boats and little flat diamonds that blew up in balls with a single puff.

Our routine was to use part of each session for me to tell him
about what had happened since I last saw him. He always inquired how often I had wet my pants and bed that week, but he didn’t stop there. “What do you think at the moment you are wetting? What do you feel when your mother takes Jonny’s side?” No one had ever asked such stuff before, and I was usually stumped, so he drew responses by asking me to say the first thing I thought of, no matter what it was or how unrelated … then the thing after that … and so on. These chains of thoughts, like the game of Telephone, led us in unlikely directions, through comic book characters, fairy tales, baseball players, puns, jokes, advertising rhymes, and plain nonsense. Yet they always astonishingly got to something that made sense and gave a hidden explanation for my behavior. It was by far the neatest game I had ever played.

After a few sessions Dr. Fabian explained that we were trying to get into my unconscious mind where the true causes of my fears and wetting were disguised in a code. “Things you can’t tell yourself directly you let dreams and unconscious actions speak for you. Once you learn what these are, they can no longer control or harm you.”

This was unexpected, bizarre information. To me, danger was, as Flash Gordon knew … danger. When someone threw you in a scalding shower or said, “Down the dungeon stairs with you, into the dark forever,” he meant it. Cancer was cancer, the worst of killers and calamities. Polio was the name of another terrible disease. You could hear it in the very word, pretending to be “polo,” then tricking you with that evil “i.”

“No,” Dr. Fabian insisted, “those are cover stories, ruses you’ve made up to hide other things you don’t want to know, things you can’t face.” He promised that by our interpreting my dreams and free-connecting my thoughts, we would be led to what he called the promised land. We’d undo Nanny’s hexes and repair the damage she had done. “Your fears will evaporate,” he declared with a beatific smile, “just like that!”

I thought of my record “What Makes Rain,” in which gleeful little droplets are converted by the sun into clouds and sing happily as they fall back onto the earth into thirsty flowers, rivers, and seas.
Could I turn my own pangs of terror into harmless vapors as easily?

I asked Dr. Fabian where I hid things. After all, there was only me and I knew about myself.

“In wet pants,” he replied, “in daydreams, and in fears. Richard’s unconscious self makes decisions for him too.”

It seemed absurd that some person inside me would cause me to wet my pants and conceal stuff to my detriment. Why would I sabotage myself? Finding a way through this subterfuge was our next order of business.

In the first dream we studied, I was arranging a chemistry set. The flask suddenly cracked in my hands and I was running down the hall to throw it in the toilet bowl, but I was too late. A burning liquid spilled through my fingers onto my legs. That, Dr. Fabian told me, was a symbol; it combined urine and poison. Nanny’s warnings about infecting myself with my own pee had turned it into an acid that I failed to dispose of in time. “This dream by itself doesn’t answer the big question,” he explained, “but it tells us many important things; for instance that there’s a relationship between your wetting and your fears.”

I was delighted by his clever deciphering and I tested it in my mind over and over again. It fit as perfectly as a solution in the back of a puzzle book. “What figures go together? Which one doesn’t match? What’s the only path through the maze?” Peeing was not peeing, poison was not poison; even fear was not fear. Bedwetting was an unconscious deed, committed in the darkness of sleep, but it left a rebus, a chain as incremental and traceable as those in the game of Telephone.

Week by week a dream landscape unfolded. Bob, the mean counselor from Swago, represented Daddy—he had the same first name. My mother was a giant wounded bird. My brother was a scruffy, black dog who clamped his teeth onto my arm so that I couldn’t pull it away. Dr. Fabian was flattered to find himself a magician, then General Manager of the Yankees.

The most surprising interpretation involved St. Louis Cardinal outfielder Enos Slaughter, who appeared as a Bill-Dave counselor. After free connection Dr. Fabian concluded that his name referred
to Dr. Hitzig and he was trying to tell us about the dungeon stairs. “How’d you like to have a name like that?” he ad-libbed, disappointed that I hadn’t caught onto the bloodshed at once. To me Enos Slaughter was just another player on a card until Dr. Fabian decoded him.