Report from the Interior (9 page)

Why hark back to this story now, this ancient scrape with fear that turned out rather well for you in the end, so well, in fact, that you walked away from it without suffering any of the consequences you had anticipated with such dread? Because, finally, there were consequences, even if they were not the ones that made your heart beat so fast when you were afraid. You had a secret. There was a flaw in you that had to be kept hidden from the world, and because merely to think about being discovered filled you with a wretchedness beyond all imagining, you were forced to dissemble, to present a face to the world that was not your true face. Later that morning, when George made his confession to you, revealing that he too had once lived with that same secret himself, it occurred to you that most people had secrets of their own, perhaps all people, an entire universe of people treading the earth with thorns of guilt and shame stabbing their hearts, all of them forced to dissemble, to present a face to the world that was not their true face. What did this mean about the world? That everyone in it was more or less hidden, and because we were all other than what we appeared to be, it was next to impossible to know who anyone was. You wonder now if that sense of not knowing wasn’t responsible for making you so passionate about books—because the secrets of the characters who lived inside novels were always, in the end, made known.

It would be an exaggeration to say you were homesick that summer. You didn’t long for your parents, you didn’t write letters complaining about your situation or feel any desire to be rescued, no, you were reasonably content throughout that long sojourn in the pine woods of New Hampshire, but at the same time not quite up to par, a bit depleted and lonely, and when the next year rolled around and your mother asked you if you wanted to return to the camp, you said no, you would prefer to stay at home and spend the summer playing baseball with your friends. Not the wisest decision, as it turned out, for even though you played ball for three or four hours a day, there were the other hours to be filled when you weren’t playing, not to speak of the rain-drenched mornings when there was no playing at all, which meant you had too much time on your hands, you were idle for long stretches without knowing what to do with yourself, and even if those solitary periods were in fact nourishing to you in the end, back in the summer of 1956 you felt rather lost. You still had your first bicycle, the old orange two-wheeler with the foot brakes and the fat tires that your parents had bought for you when you were six (the following year, you would graduate to a larger one to accommodate your growing body—sleek and black, with hand brakes and thin tires), and every morning you would mount that too-small bike and peddle over to your friend Peter J.’s house, about a quarter of a mile away. The baseball field was in Peter’s backyard, not a regulation field, of course, but an open area of worn-out grass and dirt that felt abundant to you at the time, or at least sufficient for games played by nine-year-olds, with stones for bases and a triangle etched into the bare ground for home plate, and on a typical morning there would be eight or ten of you in that yard with your gloves and bats and balls, dividing up into two teams, with the members of each team taking turns fielding various positions because everyone wanted a chance to pitch at least one inning per game, and there were many games, a double-header every day, sometimes even triple-headers, and you all took the games seriously, playing hard, with everyone keeping track of the number of home runs he hit (a fly ball into the bushes beyond left field), and so passed the most engaging hours of that summer, playing on a makeshift field in your friend’s backyard, swatting fifty home runs, a hundred home runs, five hundred home runs into the bushes.

You liked Peter more than any other boy in your class, he had replaced the now-absent Billy as your closest friend, but within a year he too would be gone, departing to another town and disappearing from your life forever. You don’t know why his family left, so you will not attribute it to the fact that too many Jews were settling in the neighborhood, which was how your mother tended to read all such departures, but there was no question that your friend’s family looked upon you as someone from a different world, especially his Swedish grandfather, an old man with white hair and heavily accented English who, in an outburst of anger against you one afternoon, banished you from the house and forbade you ever to set foot in there again. It must have been sometime after the summer of backyard baseball, early September perhaps, about a month before you met the real or not-real Whitey Ford, and one day after school had been let out you and Peter went back to his house, and because it was raining that afternoon, the two of you stayed inside, eventually going downstairs to explore the cellar. Among the packing crates and spiderwebs and discarded pieces of furniture, you found an old set of golf clubs, which struck you both as an important discovery, since neither one of you had ever held a golf club in your hands, and so for the next little while you took turns swinging a seven-iron in the dampness of that subterranean room, taking turns because the cellar was crowded and there wasn’t enough space for both of you to swing at the same time. At one point, without your knowledge, just as you were about to launch into another practice swing, Peter crept up behind you to have a better look, crept up too close to you, entering the area that encompassed the arc of your backswing, and because you hadn’t heard him and couldn’t see him, you flung your fully extended arms backward with the club in your two hands, not expecting to meet any resistance, confident that your backswing would fly unencumbered through the empty air, but because Peter had crossed the invisible threshold of what should have been all air and nothing else, the backswing of your club was interrupted in midflight when it struck something solid, and an instant after your backswing was stopped, you heard a scream, a sudden, all-out scream blasting against the walls of the cellar. The tip of the iron had gone straight into Peter’s forehead, it had pierced the skin, blood was flowing from the wound, and your friend was shrieking in pain. You felt horrified, sick with fear, guiltless and yet filled with guilt, but before you could do anything to help, Peter’s grandfather was charging down the stairs to the cellar, shoving you aside, and commanding you to leave the house. Even then, you understood why he should have been so angry, it seemed altogether natural for him to lose his temper at that moment, for there was his grandson, weeping and bleeding after a golf club had cracked him in the head, and whether it was your fault or not, you were responsible for injuring his beloved boy, so he let you have it. Understandable as that anger was to you, however, it must be said that you had rarely witnessed anger on that scale—perhaps never. It was a monumental anger, an outburst of rage worthy of the God of the Old Testament, the vengeful, homicidal Yahweh of your darkest dreams, and as you listened to the old man shout at you, it soon became apparent that not only was he sending you home, he was barring you from his house forever, telling you that you were no good, a wicked boy, and that
we have no use for your kind.
You staggered out of there feeling pummeled and shaken, miserable about what you had done to Peter, but worst of all were the old man’s words ringing in your head. What had he meant by
your kind
? you wondered. The kind of boy who hits his friends with golf clubs and makes them bleed—or something even more sinister, some stain on your soul that could never be rubbed out? Was
your kind
simply another way of calling you a dirty Jew? Perhaps. And then again, perhaps not. That evening, when you told your mother about the seven-iron, the blood, and your friend’s grandfather, the word
perhaps
did not once cross her lips.

The following summer, you went back to the sleepaway camp in New Hampshire. The experiment in unstructured time had been no more than a partial success, that is, largely a failure, so once again you asked to go up north for July and August, and your parents, who were neither rich nor poor but well enough off to spring for the several hundred dollars it would cost to send you there, gave their consent. Bed-wetting was a thing of the past now, but beyond that dubious if necessary accomplishment, nearly everything about you was different as well. The gap between eight and ten was more than just a distance of two years, it was a chasm of decades, an enormous leap from one period of your life into another, equal to the distance you would eventually cover, say, from twenty to forty, and now that it was 1957, you were a bigger, stronger, smarter person than you had been in 1955, vastly more competent in negotiating all aspects of your life, an ever more independent boy who could march away from his parents without the slightest twinge of anxiety or regret. For the next two months you lived in the country of baseball, it was the moment of your greatest, most fanatical attachment to the sport, and you played it every day, not just during the regular activity periods in the morning and afternoon but during free time in the after-dinner hours as well, working conscientiously to become a better shortstop, a more disciplined hitter, but such was your enthusiasm for the game that you often volunteered to stand in as catcher, savoring the challenge of that unfamiliar position, and little by little the counselors who were in charge of coaching baseball began to notice how quickly you were improving, the strides you had made in just a few short weeks, and by the middle of the summer you were promoted to the big boys’ team, the twelve-, thirteen-, and fourteen-year-olds who traveled around the state playing teams from other camps, and though you struggled in the beginning to adjust to the new size of the infield (ninety feet between bases instead of sixty, sixty feet, six inches from the mound to home plate instead of forty-five feet, the standard measurements of all professional diamonds), the coaches stuck with you, you were the shortstop and leadoff hitter, the smallest player on the team, but you managed to hold your own, and so intent were you on doing well that you pushed all thoughts of failure from your mind, punishing yourself for every throwing error and strikeout you made, and even if you didn’t stand out among the older boys, you didn’t disgrace yourself either. Then came the final banquet, the big ceremonial meal that signaled the end of summer, the awards dinner at which various trophies were handed out to the boys who had been selected as the best swimmer, the best horseman, the best citizen, the best all-around camper, and so on, and suddenly you heard your name being called out by the head counselor, announcing that you had won the trophy for baseball. You weren’t sure you had heard him correctly, for it wasn’t possible that you could have won, you were too young, and you knew full well that you weren’t the best baseball player in the camp—the best for your age, perhaps, but that was a far cry from being the best of all. Nevertheless, the head counselor was summoning you to the podium, they were giving you the trophy, and since it was the first award you had ever won, you felt proud to be up there shaking the head counselor’s hand, if also a trifle embarrassed. A few minutes later, you ducked out of the mess hall to go to the latrine, that rank, stinking place that will never be expunged from your memory, and there, standing around and talking among themselves, were four or five of your older teammates, all of them eyeing you with animosity and revulsion, and as you emptied your bladder into the trough, they told you that you didn’t deserve to win the trophy, that it should have gone to one of them, and because you were nothing more than a ten-year-old punk, maybe they should beat you up to put you in your place, or else smash your trophy, or, even better, smash the trophy and then smash you. You were beginning to feel a little intimidated by these threats, but the only response you could come up with was the truth: you hadn’t asked for the award, you said, you hadn’t expected to win, and even if you agreed with them that you shouldn’t have won, what could you do about it now? Then you walked out of the latrine and returned to the dinner. Between that night and your departure from the camp two days later, no one beat you up and no one smashed your trophy.

You were inching toward the end of your childhood. The years between ten and twelve sent you on a journey no less gargantuan than the one between eight and ten, but day by day you never had the sense that you were moving quickly, hurtling forward to the brink of your adolescence, for the years passed slowly then, unlike now, when you have only to blink your eyes to discover that tomorrow is your birthday again. By eleven, you were mutating into a creature of the herd, struggling through that grotesque period of prepubescent dislocation when everyone is thrust into the microcosm of a closed society, when gangs and cliques begin to form, when some people are in and some people are out, when the word
popular
becomes a synonym for
desire,
when the childhood wars between girls and boys come to an end and fascination with the opposite sex begins, a period of extreme self-consciousness, when you are constantly looking at yourself from the outside, wondering and often fretting about how others perceive you, which necessarily makes it a time of much tumult and silliness, when the rift between one’s inner self and the self one presents to the world is never wider, when soul and body are most drastically at odds. In your own case, you found yourself becoming preoccupied with how you looked, worrying about whether you had the right haircut, the right shoes, the right pants, the right shirts and sweaters, never in your life have you been so concerned with clothes as you were at eleven and twelve, participating in the game of who was in and who was out with a desperate longing to be in, and at the Friday- and Saturday-night girl-boy parties that began sometime in the fifth grade, you always wanted to look your best for the girls, the young girls who were living through their own upheavals and torments, with their training bras stretched over flat chests or barely swollen nipples, decked out in their party dresses with the stiff crinolines and whooshing silk slips, wearing garter belts and stockings for the first time, and now, so many years later, you remember the pathos of seeing those stockings sag and droop on their scrawny legs as the evening wore on, even if you can also remember breathing in the scents of their perfume as you held them in your arms and danced with them. Rock and roll had suddenly become interesting and exciting to you. Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, and the Everly Brothers were the musicians you liked best, and you started collecting their records so you could listen to them alone in your upstairs bedroom, stacking the little 45s on their fat spindle and blasting up the volume when no one was around, and on days when you had nothing to do after school, you would rush home and turn on the television to watch
American Bandstand,
that spectacle of the new rock-and-roll universe injected daily into the country’s living rooms, but it was more than music that attracted you to the show, it was the sight of a roomful of teenagers dancing to the music that kept you watching, for that was what you aspired to most now, to become a teenager, and you studied those kids on the screen as a way to learn something about the next, impending step of your life. Last year it had been the Three Stooges; now it was Dick Clark and his gang of youthful rockers. The era of pimples and braces had begun. Mercifully, those days come only once.