CLUTTER, 33

This scheme has worked against me as well.



Flip flop the roles and see how it works reversed:


“Why don’t we marry?” I asked Clare, lifting up my bulk on a ninety degree elbow and forearm, casting a critical glance at the gray-green haze that was Clare Mumpy.


“I don’t believe in marriage during war. People get married for the wrong reasons.”


“But you’ll become an American,” I told her.


“Why would I want to be an American,” she asked.


“Everyone wants to be an American.”


“That’s rot. I hate Americans. I want to stay single. I want to keep my options open. Why would I want to tie myself down?”


And she was right. I was galled because I was on the dirty end of the stick, but she understood, in excellent Vandemark fashion, that every choice, no matter how fabulously dense in its evocative hope, however expansive in rich glittering vistas of possibility, is a form of death.

For at the beginning of the race we stand naked and ready to face a world dense with sinuous branches. The hope, that hope, that we can be or do anything is only extinguished by forward momentum, by natural capacities tested or by concomitant failures acknowledged and abandoned, by circumstances or accidents beyond control, and by our own unfailing need to constantly make choices.

By exercising this doggedly persistent impulse we actually destroy the one mechanism we possess to guide our life. We chose our own deaths. We make a choice and guide ourselves down a path that narrows with each fork; and the forks, as we progress, become fewer and far between, until we reach the point of absolute nullity, that infernal spot with no choice inherent in it; a spot that no one can squirm out of…


But for young Langley Vandemark, hat perched jauntily on his broad forehead, wrinkled jacket rakishly thrown over his bulky shoulder, lightly skipping toward a Chock Full O' Nuts truck on the corner of Madison and 42nd, death had been given a decisive knock about the head and neck. And Clare, escaping from my rascally clutches, had shape shifted away from a possible world, and delayed, much to her credit and to my immeasurable shame ---- the impending tick-tock of the maw.

CLUTTER, 27

The moors were a dark sea, and I wrapped my cape around my squared shoulders, pulled my cap down over my beetled brow, and stepped deeper into that gloom… hoping against all odds that the driving pelting rain, the cold brutally sheering wind, would somehow destroy that part of my soul that refused to surrender, that malignant growth that had grown so fearsome in its state of advanced decay it had dovetailed and given me wholesome, super numinous strength.

I felt it inside myself, a perfect black orb, shinning, metallic, attracting and repelling the world of objects, and the collision of ideas and sensations inside of my head were rankly abused by its infernal attractions, drawing all that came into its path, into the unwholesome encumbrance of its pull.

What could I do, when everything that came within my grasp eventually found its way into that orbit? What could I do, when my orbit, by necessity of its telos and design, bent and forged those objects until they were something else? My dilemma was not mere solipsism but something far graver in its scope. My mind took from the world and did not reflect itself --- took from the world through a process of hideous distillation, just what it wanted, and that was all. And even then, it was not enough. It needed to fashion the materials until they were indistinguishable from itself.



I did not so much walk out into the moors as the moors walked out into me. Every blade of grass, every granule of gray distinctless English soil struggled in a pitched battle to enter my already crowded psyche. I was crammed to the hilt with experience. Experience sought me out as if my mind had no sensory portals, but was an open funnel. I found myself running over the undulating hills. The rain, a vaporous hail of mist that fell up and down simultaneously was both a soothing tonic and an elixir of excitation.

I would crest a hill, but my legs were unready for the landing, and I would rise, upward, and before I could adjust to it, the hill would descend, and my legs would topple beneath me, and I would stumble free-fall, legs unready for a drop. Then the process repeated itself until I became giddy with the expectation of my own loss of kinetic control.


I ploughed through an oblong puddle of thick mud which pleasantly coated my hands and face. I rolled through it, only to see my way out on the other side to a thorny patch of nettles.

My water logged cape tore and ripped as I struggled to break free of the dense bramble. I rolled again, but instead of freeing myself of the nettles I seemed only to land more deeply in the briar. I could feel my skin rip; I could hear the sound of rip, as if I were being torn along an already existing suture line.

But it was not effective, I broke free, and I was running once again, my cape still on my back, but cut to ribbons, streams of delicious blood pouring down from cuts along my hair line, my neck, my chest, and the ubiquitous rain, drenching, bogging down my run, halting me as if it were quicksilver.


I ran. I ran faster. I drew off reserves I did not know I had. I calculated that I could continue north well into Scotland and perhaps I would just run out of calories… my body would burn fat, then muscle, until nothing was left and I literally fell apart into a distilled jelly that was a running human form one second and then, the next, a shapeless mass, a puddle just beneath the shadow of Hadrian’s Wall.


But I stopped. The swirl of wind and rain, so fearsome, circled around me as if I were the nexus of its concerted action, as if the snug egg of my small human habitation was somehow dreadfully important to the functioning of Nature.


When I cleared my mind of warring thoughts, and I did, I allowed them to just fall away as if I had removed a heavy suit of mail, my discipline dissolved, it was over and the tempest just disintegrated. One moment it was a black swirl of water and wind, the next, complete, deflated silence.

The rolling pitch of the moors stretched out before me, and I could have wept at their utter, stupid simplicity. They were in my mind’s eye --- they were out there, but I could not discern the difference nor did I care. The clouds peeled away at the horizon. The rip slid from the earth up the meridian of the sky and each star twinkled in understated luminosity…


When I heard the wolfhounds I didn’t believe my ears. I cocked my head from side to side to catch subtle variations in their movement. It was too good to be true --- too cinematic in its scope. To have one’s bodily essence shredded by creatures who mirror one’s own undeveloped grainy soul was perfection consummated. It was a honeymoon for my empty soul, a soul that pushed and bubbled against my hulking full, extended body. I could feel that soul essence butting against my ribs, ineffectually pushing on my spine, slouching around my pelvis like a ghostly fetus. Time for a final reckoning.


I could hear them. They surrounded me in the gully. They knew I was there. They could smell me. Any direction I moved I would encounter them. I wanted this awful consummation. For I knew, intuitively, that if I survived this encounter I was doomed. Eternally --- gothically doomed.


I stripped nude. I wanted to give the beasts a sporting chance.


Naked, hulking, absurdly large, all out of proportion to the surrounding scale of nature. I stepped off the small precipice. Red eyes, snarled teeth, a low hiss, the ragged claw over soft homo sapien skin, and the musky odor of hides, dog-breath and warm dripping saliva. I was end over end, jaws in an arm, a leg, back neck… but my integrity was maintained. Almost immediately the venture had failed. All that was broken was my heart. Naked, ripped, yet essentially whole; I wept like a babe.

CLUTTER, 24

THIRTEEN


The half way point of the century, nineteen fifty, when I have been home from the war nearly five years, seemed like a good time to shut off water, gas, and electricity from our brownstone.

I had already been harassed by some of the petty officials at the companies that supplied me with the so-called necessities of life. I had become niggardly in my payments, not from a lack of funds (Vandemark money never runs out, even under the grossest mismanagement) but from a philosophical principle: from the simple premise that if I was to lose nothing more then no more should go out.

In my zeal I had forgotten that those on the outside would require a unit of money for a unit of labor or product I received, that they too had the integrity of their systems to uphold and maintain. A typical exchange with some officious official would go like this:


Opening the door, my head almost above the jamb, I would stoop to see the intruder or bend over and step into the strong daylight, quickly realizing that dozens of street eyes were watching me.


“Yes,” I said deeply, as if with a bed of gravel in my gullet.


“Mr. Vandemark? Mr. Langley Vandemark?” I nodded. “I’m Mr. Coalpepper from Consolidated Edison. I’m afraid I’m here on some very troubling business. You see…


“How much is the bill?” I asked.


“One hundred and twenty five dollars and sixty cents, sir.”


I bent down and low bridged it back into the house. Fumbling in my desk I could see Coalpepper’s mottled, greasy head scanning the dark interior of my house. Behind him several black people were craning around Coalpepper’s slim form trying to catch a glimpse. Catching the trick latch on the desk I opened the trick drawer and took out a wad of cash. I counted out the money and gathered up the odd assortment of change. When I emerged outside I handed him the wad. He was startled.


“And shut it off.” I said.


“Excuse me, Mr. Vandemark?” he whimpered.


“Shut off the electricity. I won’t be needing it anymore.” He looked up at me with awe, as if I had broken some incest taboo and had the audacity to scream it out loud in the public square. He backed away and melted into the large, still gathering crowd.


When Mr. Wasserman came to collect the water bill I dispatched him in a similar manner. I gave him his proverbial walking papers with the words “Shut the water off I won’t be needing it,” no doubt my phrase was ringing in his ears as he walked away like a secret name of God some fool had the temerity to scream at the top of his lungs on the courthouse steps. He backed away from my long shadow at the base of the steps, pad of cash in hand, and was subsumed into the street sidewalk crowd.


The most troublesome character in this ensemble cast was Mr. Pennyworth, a representative at the bank that held our mortgage. He was a man to be reckoned with. After repeated written inquiries (all strongly worded admonishments) followed by a regular schedule of verbal harassment (visits at odd hours, his minions facing my stubbornly closed door), Pennyworth arrived one stifling summer morning with two police officers and sharply folded foreclosure papers for me to sign unless I could provide the full balance of the mortgage immediately in cash or cashier’s check.

The men stood impassively in the hall. Pennyworth was a worthy opponent; the others had been mere company snivelers, flaccid lackeys, one and all. At least Pennyworth showed up with the law; he knew how to flex a taut muscle. The man knew how to exchange hit for hit. Faced with such papers (documentation has always cowed me) my bluff was called.


“What is the balance, Mr. Pennyworth?”


“Two-thousand four hundred and thirty seven dollars and seventy-two cents,” he related impassively.


I cleared a space from my desk. It was recessed in a nook of the living room so neither Pennyworth nor his charges could see my manipulations. When I emerged I handed Pennyworth the full amount in cash and change. He was momentarily stunned; his poker face showed a glimmer of surprise. He could see how I was living, the state that I was in and how my surroundings were arranged. He gave me a receipt and without further word showed himself out.

CLUTTER, 19

ELEVEN



Homer had gotten loose. He lacked a fundamental understanding of what sacrifice it takes to staunch an irreversible negative flow of energy… a drain downhill to entropy.

I loaded the tray with ointments, salves, that month’s round of special foods and vitamins, and when I opened the door of his room he was nowhere to be found. I checked under the bed. I had already sealed shut his closet. Most of the rooms had too much debris to maneuver about in, but I checked some overlooked crawl spaces and dead ends on the second floor, but he was nowhere to be found. I started turning over boxes, boards, old disused furniture.

I took out a flashlight and stabbed the dark, probing along the outer edge of the upper landing of the stairs, which by this time was a unnavigable maze of broken pieces of cars, mattresses, box springs, crates and used barrels. He was not there. After a more than cursory search of the first floor which still had, at that time, a relatively large amount of open space, I decided, to my utter disbelief, that he had somehow gotten out of the brownstone. Homer, at this juncture, was  ninety five percent blind, unaware, even in a glancing sense, of how baroque and clustered his surroundings were. To me, his escape was unimaginable.


I sat on a hard wooden bench in the hall way, the bench I would take my winter boots off on when I was a boy and gripped my temples with my massive hands. A little glint of anger, diamond hard, was lodged in my mind. Above me a bulb suspended from a frayed wire swung with the counter rhythm of my swaying. My shadow swung around me in dizzying circles.


I stood up decisively and moved the debris in front of the street door, an entrance not used in three or four years. With great effort I pushed it open. Rain was pouring down. Running breathlessly around the house I looked for holes. I did not need to look long.

A piece of rotting wood had been kicked away from a rear window barrier and he had apparently slithered through the narrow aperture. Shinning the flashlight on the ground I could see drag marks leading away from the building toward the abandoned yard in the back. I found him face down in the mud. He was looking for a chink in the fence, inadequately groping his way along the perimeter. I got down on my knees and roughly turned him around.


“Ahhhhh!”he screamed, he cried, his face was seized by panic sorrow, dread, simultaneously. I felt all my defenses slide and slip and I was naked before him, in a complete fusion of empathy and then they clicked firmly in place again and my resolve was back. At first I wanted to hold him and then I wanted to slap his face. All I managed to do for that  awful moment was to vigorously shake him. “Ahhhhh,” came that scream again, this time unmistakable, sorrow


“Ahhh Langley, I know that you know better, that I don’t know nothing… but its… I can’t…. It’s just…” He started a round of machine like sobbing. He seemed to be choking on the rainwater that was drenching on both of us. His small feet were kicking in the mud with spasmodic jerks.

I pulled him close to me and tried to hoist him up. He clenched his little fetal fists and was quite ineffectually hitting my chest. I gathered him up, trying to shelter him from the rain by wrapping him in a loose tarp that was clinging to the fence. I lifted him, a senseless, sobbing bundle, back to the house.

CLUTTER, 17

TEN



The old Packard sped along the country lane. Some stubborn fluffy sheep, unwilling to move out of the way, temporarily halted the car. Gavin dismounted from the driver’s seat and parted the flock in two with a large stick like a diminutive and downy Moses. We started again.


Gavin, using his intricate wartime connections, had secured a doctor’s petrol card. Stopping at a pump just outside of Crotchford Downs the gas attendant asked questions about his rheumatism.


“When does it hurt old boy, morning or evening?” Gavin asked clinically.


“Well, your doctorship, sees it hurtz all the time.”


“Mmmm…” Gavin mused, “it would be better, old boy, if it hurt at a particular time of day. Some times are better than others for pain, you know.”


“Really?” he asked.


“Most assuredly.”


“Well, can’t you give me sumthing from yur medical bag. Don’t ya have one?”


“Yes, of course, the bag. Where is that bloody bag. Most likely in the trunk. Hold on, old boy.”


Gavin’s slim body, tapered even further by his tight driving tweeds, slipping out of the seat, momentarily stood on the running board and then hopped off. He walked to the trunk and rummaged about for sometime. When he emerged he took the gas attended aside and gave him detailed instructions.


Driving away, Clare asked, “What did you give him?”


“Sugar pills. Harmless but extremely effective. I give them to our footman when he complains of the gout. Perhaps it works well on rheumatism as well. We shall see.”


“How’s your chest, darling?” Clare asked me.


“Oh fine, a little sore,” I answered. I peeked between the buttons of my shirt to the purple stain spreading across my chest.


“That’s the first time a Great War relic actually saved a man in this war, I’m sure. You are a creature of firsts, aren’t you? If we didn’t have a black market car with illegally procured petrol we could put you in for a medal, certainly.”


“Do you want me to look at it?” Lesley said, turning her blue cross eyed stare to me, “I had some nursing training before I chucked it because of the blood en guts’en all.”


“No, really, no fuss, please.” I felt Clare’s small hand resting on top of mine. She leaned close as the car accelerated. Trees were overhanging the road, clumps of tight green waxy buds swayed in the breeze. Grasses shook by the roadside as the car sped by. Hares sprung in front of the car and then disappeared speedily into ditches on the opposite side.


I felt my chest. I was a miracle that such a small metal case could deflect a bullet. It must have ricocheted off the car before hitting, slowing it down. I scanned the immediate area for a dent or a hole and did not find one. I sat back and felt my firm, numb, chest. “You alright darling?” Clare asked again. I smiled and nodded.


Further north the landscape changed appreciably. Gone was the early spring mist, the fresh green nubby growth, the hazy veil of sunshine.


Crotchford Downs sat moodily upon a promontory of fractured stone, lording over a rolling landscape of brown undulating moors.


The car sped up a winding stone paved road flanked on either side by roughhewn, ancient stone houses. They were squat and square and the identical brown hue as the surrounding landscape. Only the chimneys, a more modern chipping red and white brick, added a splash of color to the monochrome dwellings.


Gavin pointed the car to the Manor House and ascended the last slope of the hill. A man in dark overalls and a cap opened and closed the front gate behind us. As the gate closed and latched shut I felt as if my heart were a lute string strung too tight, as I touched it, it resounded. I thought the strange sensation was the shock of the German bullet, but it was something else. I looked up upon the bleak walls --- upon the vacant eye-like windows – upon a few rank sedges --- and upon a few white trunks of decayed trees, and thought I saw, superimposed upon this-all-to English scene, a squat brownstone on Fifth Avenue between the two houses.

There was a duality not of sight but of archetype. Budge Manor, dark, tall, Gothic, choked with rigorous dense ivy, dripping with a peculiar green-black moisture, and our house, longer and taller, cluttered, a maze, were irregular twins gazing at each other in a fun house mirror, held up for mutual inspection. The minute seed within me, the germinating tendency of growth followed by rapid decay, clicked and fastened up yet another ratchet, took a decisive step toward fulfilling its teleology.


Taking our bags out of the car I felt as if I may swoon, not from physical or emotional exhaustion but from the sheer weight of abstract possibility. The terrible knowledge assaulted me that whatever came forth from then on would be a journey not outward into the unknown of the future (which is how most of us experience time) but a return to what I knew already existed. It was as if I had been allowed to float above the limited span of my own slice of determinism for thirty-four years and view my life with a divine detachment.

But I was now steadily descending from that privileged height. I was dovetailing from the abstract to the concrete, the ideal to the real, the general to the particular --- the oppressively specific. It had the weight of a vision, but instead of peeling the layers off reality to give me a fair glimpse of my glimmering future, it merely gummed up the inevitable more. It did not explicate my future, but eradicated it.


Gavin surveyed the front of the manor. “Good God,” he said dejectedly, “even drearier than when I was here last. The country seat has deteriorated. It’s a law of thermodynamics, isn’t it old boy. Things fall apart unless you put energy into them, right’oh?”


“Sometimes they fall apart when you put energy in them, or in spite of putting energy in them,” I answered. “They just can’t handle the added load. No adequate substrate”


“How provocative,” Gavin mused as we entered the oblong entryway.


Gavin ushered us from one dark room to another, adjoining dark room. Tall Gothic ceilings caked in old tallow soot, smeared beveled glass windows looking out over pocked rock outcroppings, and staring vacantly over the moor country, undulating like a frozen brown seascape. The central hall opened into a formal dining room with a massive hearth twice my height. Above us, reaching up a staircase of stone, was an upper landing that led to bedrooms, fitting rooms and the rear, disused part of the house collapsing from decay.


“There’s more to the house, of course, its positively ancient, but we only keep up a sliver of it. The rest is in ruins of sorts. I’ll probably sell it after the war. Out with the old and in with the new, as they say,” Gavin said without a hint of sentiment. “Aristocracy means nothing now. Its brass knuckles that count.” He held up his small fist for emphasis.


The footman with psychosomatic gout limpingly showed Clare and I our room. It was a large, drafty, tastefully decorated bedroom in the neo-medieval style, with a canopied bed and on a far wall a richly depicted tapestry of St. George defeating the dragon. George had his lance drawn and was about to plunge without compunction or hesitation, the glistening point into the beast’s gilled hide. I pulled back the tapestry. Behind the wall was a drafty, dark nook.


Clare sat on the bed and tested its springiness. I stood by the window looking out over the moors. The sky was a typical English gray, but a ring of black clouds, little wisps at the horizon, poked above the ring of hills. I stood tall in the window, blocking out what little light came in; a leafless hedge, scraggly and veiny, rustled in the wind, scratching the window irregularly.


When I turned around Clare had removed her skirt and was nude from the waist down. She was sitting on the edge of the bed, just at the margin of the mattress, with the balls of her feet propped on the thin lip of exposed box spring. She was facing me. Her eyes were fixed on my broad face. I strode toward her and immediately unzipped my pants. Lifting her up, she wrapped her long legs around my waist. I grasped her light body from the bottom. She dug her long nails into my neck. She gulped greedily at me, moving up and down along my length and I placed my hands on her belly, guiding her. Her eyes had a deep yellow cast, her skin, a glistening green.

She leaned forward and sunk her teeth into my shoulder. Her brown hair flung forward into my eyes… I smelled the peppermint fragrance of her shampoo. Her musky breath was on my cheek as I pressed her crushingly close.

CLUTTER, 16

NINE


While Homer disintegrated, shrank and emaciated to his marrow, I expanded. The simple and necessary observation was hard to ignore: we somehow lived and grew in an inverse ratio to each other. Even later, when the opposite state seemed to be wholly true, when I did not know where he began and I ended, there was still the problem of delineating a boundary, still the doggedly persistent inability of separating me from him.

If we were both robust and healthy perhaps our unbalanced symbiosis would never have occurred. If I grew to be a giant out of all proportion to my surroundings, then I needed a helpless Fay Ray to obligate me to reference the world. I would have simply grown so utterly out of human dimensions that I would have no longer belonged to the ranks of humanity at all. For growth and decay, diminishment and flourishing, expansiveness and decline, all exist on the same fluid slope. Never did I believe that I would ever rise above my antinomies. I could never hold both polar impulses without my own Homer, without my blind bard as a divining rod…


I thought if I cured Homer and he recuperated that this shrunken homunculus would grow to a full man and destroy this dance with opposites. I held the hope that if Homer could yet rise from the exile of physical penury that nature had imposed on him, that somehow the Vandemark line would not continue to be the withered stump it had become.

Somehow the House of Vandemark would have its heir; would receive its rightful measure in due and just proportion from country, clan and history. I did not care what this new embryo would become. As long as there was a progression to new life! If there is any torture in dualism it comes from the knowledge that it often fails to be procreative; that simple exclusive categories can be juxtaposed, conjoined, but yield nothing from their efforts, or merely a stalemate of mutually exclusive blocks… a dull thud as they collide, and then they resume their course, as if nothing happened… as if the event never occurred!


So when I inherited the House of Vandemark I decided to clear the plate. I firmly resolved to embark on a set of drastic measures to put my house in order.


The first, obvious step was Homer. Medical science had failed him repeatedly, so I had to fill the void. I had volumes of Father’s medical books to use for consultation. Since specialization, that great innovation of modern medical rigor, had failed him, perhaps pastiche would succeed. I made him sit for hours with a poultice of vitamin C and aloe over his spent eyes. He was required to eat large quantities of specific foods, while eliminating others entirely, to build up his spindly body, to give healthfulness an adequate platform to prosper.

These binge diets lasted for weeks on end, and then would cease abruptly and shift gears. First he was required to eat all protein and no fat. Then, in a dietary about face, all fat and no protein. The massive doses of vitamin C were quickly followed by a regimen of vitamin C from natural sources: navel oranges, grapefruits, and tangerines in quantities all out of proportion to any scale of normalcy. Another month, he ingested vast amounts of vitamin D; then I depleted his diet of vitamin D for the following month. Then I sat him on our roof in July, that year the sunniest July on record, incidentally, and allowed his pasty white skin, under my careful monitoring, to grow a deep amber, than a resilient bronze.


Homer tried his best to cooperate with my schemes, deferring to my superior knowledge and experience. And my brother’s body seemed to be an extremely pliable object; as a medium it responded marvelously to all manner of stimuli, oral, physical and topical (unlike my body --- which is as impermeable as stone). But it was hard on him, my poor brother, it taxed his spirit; he was always a weak little stripling, and if it were not in the name of progress I would have discontinued the regimen and let him just rest. But I felt, not without some clinical basis, that with enough trial and error, enough blind stabs into the clinical darkness, I could find the perplexing source of his blindness, and bring him from perpetual night to everlasting day.


I looked down on his wan, exhausted face, so similar to mine in every detail except bulk, and administered one more fad ointment, spoon feed him yet another vitamin mash, and a little more darkness would envelope him.

Nothing worked. And as I looked around me, and what my world had become, I realized, as a thin sliced  removed from a cataract, I was totally incapable, even in such a rich world I had created, to make my way out of the confounding maze.

CLUTTER, 8

FIVE



Events progressed, in spite of hazing in and out and despite the world growing in and out of focus. For certain rooms, upon my leaving them, appeared to disappear. And I left rooms, and tested these principles, walking out into the street. I walked back in the building by some other passage, dawdled on some other floor, returned by a different passage, stopped short of my door, walked past it and then quickly returned and swung it open. For a cataclysmic moment I thought there was no room there --- and no space inside the room as well --- just a curious negation --- spellbinding blankness.


In spite of these harrowing exercises, I did not mind my office, nor my work. In fact, my patriotic yearnings kept me at my task with officiousness. And there was so much to do in those early days.

The Vandemark’s, with their American connections, their deep pragmatic urges and conspiratorial drives, always turned their lily white faces toward grand stands wrapped in red, white and blue bunting every Forth of July. Father, before he left Mother, would don his broad brimmed straw summer hat, his white sports coat and flared tan trousers, would pack Mother, Homer, me and our governess off to the Central Park Grandstand and we would settled down in the sheep tooth shorn grass of the Great Lawn and listen to the stirring brass notes of patriot songs and wait with trembling limbs for twilight to approach and the first Roman candles to arch upward, exploding over the flat gray buildings of the nascent Manhattan skyline.


The bandstand was host to a score of fat, placid musicians in red suspenders, bow ties, bowler hats, and wide flared white trousers. A tuba bobbed up and down as it beat out a bass line; the brass of trumpets and coronets thrust out to the semi-circle of crowd surrounding the gazebo like brazen fetishes.

And standing in front of the assemblage was a thin, elegant man in a semi-military uniform, blue and black Union Army coat with golden tassels dangling from the epaulets; a peaked Army of the Potomac cap perched low over his head; blue trousers with a crimson piping running from waist to his ankles; dress shoes gleaming a patent leather black. Handle bar moustaches thrusting from the sides of his face like outlandish bolts.


A march wafted over the crowd; it moved around the Great Lawn in pleasing undulations as brass and drums paced out the regular syncopation of Yankee Doodle. But this time it was played with a more 18th century musical patterning (not the stereotyped modern version, a little ditty played too nostalgically to create a Revolutionary War milieu) but a rousing call to battle, a spirited rally for a new nation to take the terms of the disparagement of its enemies and make them their own.


The New Nationalism was everywhere. Hardly a person did not have at least a swatch of red, white and blue somewhere on his body. Before these multi-colored days the colors of the national emblem were more or less confined to the flag, and hardly ever espied any other place but the stars and bars.

Now is was as if the flag had bled. Red, white and blue burst from its confines and spilled onto clothing: red, white and blue broad ties, sometimes in an exact replica of the flag, at other times in a stylized pattern of free-floating stars, fluttering bars, developing into abstract patterns: red dots, blue slashes, white wavy lines.

People were suddenly wearing red, white and blue flag jackets; stars and bars pants. Then there was the nostalgia flag craze: Don’t Tread On Me, with that disquieting coiled snake rising from a stylized bed of grass. The Revolutionary War era continental flag: thirteen white stars orbiting in a perfect circle neatly centered in a field of late twilight blue.


Out beyond the grandstand near the green gold line of trees made hazily indistinct by the descending ozone of the summer evening, a field of brown canisters were laid out. A team of busy mustached, shirt sleeved Italians were laying out charges and running detonators.

They were being supervised by a neatly dressed Italian man in a mauve colored coat and matching straw hat; a waist coat spread over an expanding, prosperous belly. As a first generation Italian with the fireworks contract for the City of New York, he was nervous, excited, barking at his men in Calabrese, don’t screw up those charges, don’t cross those lines, be careful of that patch of grass, its still wet from the rain...


Another summer. Another Fourth of July! Why did the summers seem longer when we were young? Why does time seem to accelerate as we grow older, when we are in greater need of that precious, rapidly depleting commodity?


The sky turned a pale blue, then a deeper dusky blue black; and rapidly, for the light and color at twilight, when examined steadily without interruption, transforms more rapidly than any other of nature’s phenomenon. Light blue to dusty red; dusty red to flat yellow… yellow blending effortlessly to a dark blue to perfect undifferentiated black. An ideal backdrop for….


Stubby Calabrese fingers light a fuse, and with a sudden hiss, delineating the moment prior to ignition and the controlled cataclysm to come, rockets ascended into the even blackness and explode, mushrooming plumes of red, white and blue sparkles, mixing together like leaking neon, and somehow exploding again when they reached a lower elevation, plunging into star shaped patterns, before burning out, trailing downward to the earth in spent reams of smoke.


There would be the inevitable hush following the cacophonous finale; all that remains is the cloud of bluish smoke, a pungent gunpowder aroma. And people would begin to chatter again; small knots began to disengage from the crowed and filter down to subways, back to stifling apartments, heading toward the disappointment of July Fifth, an unlucky day indeed, so close to its cousin in name and chronology but drained of all the celebratory charm, another summer day, one step closer to the autumnal equinox, one more step Persephone takes toward hell.


Father, a medical doctor, was so imbued with the New Nationalism that he grew a moustache Teddy Roosevelt style. I believe his brash mannerisms were nothing more than a conscious attempt to transform himself into Tough Teddy. Somehow, at a point when the American frontier was officially closed, this fossilized imprint of American manhood sprang forth fully toothed and armored.


An American man was independent, self-willed, individually reliant, not prone to effacement, either of self or of his fellows. The frontier, the natural habitat of this independently driven creature, was no more than an imaginary boundary in the surprisingly fragile male psyche.

The actual frontier, now the enclosed prairie, with clumps of placid cows munching on fields of clover, was a far west parceled out into tame reserves and national parks. The American man was becoming undone; not at once, but at the borders, at the margins of the self which is actually more vital than the so-called center, for at the margins the interactions with the world are enacted; it is at the perimeter where fragile transactions with inside and outside transpire.


This brash swaggering man from Long Island, this Tough Teddy of the child’s bear fame, the Rough Rider who, after loosing his first wife on the birthing bed, was plunged into a world of darkness, took off to the West, the breeding ground for underdeveloped American manhood.

He wore round owl eyed eyeglasses, donned chaps, sported a nifty lasso, calf-skined hat, knee high boots, and took a photograph surrounded by surly cow-pokes and dusty bulls and cream colored calf’s. These images would set the tone for American manliness for most of our disjointed and ad-hoc century.

What had come naturally, due to necessity, pragmatism and bald need, now became a poise. What had been fluid, was rigidified. What filled a niche was now frozen form. The American man had become an urban creature, a bureaucrat, an office holder, a clerk seated at a pressed particle board desk in the open lobby of a great Wall Street banking concern.

But above it all, floating like a murdered ghost, disembodied and seeking its measure of honest retribution, was the spook of American manhood, burly armed, broad chested, deep throated, hairy legged, galloping up San Juan Hill, capturing Manila, marching through the winding alleys of Old Havana.


Father was so zealous that he made an unsuccessful bid to secure a commission when the United States entered the Great War, when he was too old, and should have known better. He never saw France. He grew more sullen after this, physically absent, mentally distant, then of course he decamped leaving our family. But his absence was not necessarily from this failure, but from a thousand mental defects that he had failed to transform in his active, subtle mind, into victories. All was laid out for Father, but he ignored essentials. He chose to let the obvious facts of his own power lie in the dust.


Regardless, the urge to serve, to serve at any cost, was handed from Father to Son with no dissolution. He passed the cup to me and I drank deeply. For Father had always believed in a certain uniformity of action and intent. He always strove to forget the past and plough through to the uncertain future, vague, indistinct or careless as he may have been in his methods and designs. He always put the best proverbial shoe forward.

Mother, parlor room Mother, really unaware of the Vandemark historical load, shrunk from Father’s pace; she was diminished in the wake of his dynamism. She began to disintegrate from the wear and tear of existence in the Vandemark churning mechanism.


When Father finally left Mother for that other woman and misadventures out west, she seemed to seep into a black vortex. She occupied a space, of course, but a dimension was lost that she never recovered. The distinctness of shade, color, and contour had been drained away at her margins leaving a whisy-washy Rose Vandemark.

A woman who had transferred those vital elements of self to husband and children and lost them forever to the vicissitudes of a blind masculine whimsy. How could she have known how much we would take from her and never give back? How could she imagine what depths her son would travel toward? How he would transform himself into an insubstantial shade. And how that shade would suspend itself over a ridiculous void; a tiny, meaningless point of nullity so simple in its dimensions that falling into it aptly illustrates how seductive such traps truly are.

For there is talk and there is action. There is faith and there is belief. There is form and there is matter. And both these dualities belong together in union, but are heart breakingly easily torn asunder.

CLUTTER, 4

By the time I reached London on a gray winter morning I was in desperate need of a shave, I hadn’t had a decent meal since I disembarked at Cardiff, and much to my consternation the person I was supposed to meet (my crinkled and stained papers read Lt. C. Mumpy) was not at the appointed spot at the appointed time to take me to HQ and then my billet.



I stood on the corner in amazement at surreal London post-blitz. Up the street, down toward Piccadilly Circus, a row of flats had been squashed, but next to them, quite incongruously, nothing was damaged whatsoever (later I was to discover this was quite a natural occurrence). It was as if a tooth had been knocked out of an otherwise normal set of choppers.


People milled about in solitary clumps. Everyone’s clothes were shabby dull gray and faded black. I noticed the stares at my uniform, and became keenly aware that these Londoners had expectant faces. I glanced at my wristwatch, and then looked about, noticing a pub on the corner just beyond a pile of bricks. Maneuvering around the chipped chimney red lumps and a sallow young woman pushing a black perambulator, I pushed opened the blue green beveled glass door of the Boer’s Loins and entered.

The pub was crowded with working men and women, sitting at tables, on stools at the bar, murmuring loudly. There was the pleasant clinking of glass, the low hum of a radio reporting dreadful news from North Africa, and an overhanging blue haze of smoke. Many heads turned my way as I ordered a pint.


I was bound to disappoint the English and not terribly eager to speak. As you may imagine mine was not the typical American cut. If these war weary Europeans expected an optimistic frontiersman, a rude, healthy, backwoods cousin unfettered by European self- consciousness, they had the wrong man. I had an old world complexity that would shatter their expectations. I had, how can I best put it, a continental baroque-ness to my identity, a contempt of the banal, superficial, and the facilely forthright that is often found in the French. I was like an aborted European fetus let loose on the shores of the Hudson River. Vandemarks placed one weary foot in front of another and tried to will strength from pure bullheadedness.

But we were a tired clan. The color and depth had been drained from our line. We tried to midwife ourselves into the optimists that we could never be. Sipping a pint in that pub, listening to the BBC crackle on the radio, being jostled about by people whose common heritage I supposedly shared, I could feel the proverbial floor drop beneath me.


“What’s up luv?” a voice wafted toward me over the bar, a husky cockney voice.


“I’m pissed,” a girl-woman’s voice answered, buzzing near my ear like a pesky fly. “Some Yank was supposed ta meet me and he decamped or never arrived or I don’t know where in bleedin' hell he iz.”


“A Yank?”


“Yes.”


“Why, there’s one here in the pub.”


“Where?” she asked incredulously. The man swung her about bodily until she faced me. Her round face was livid with anger and rage, almost to tears. For a tense, exquisite moment I did know if she was going to strike me or cry. Her finely plucked dark eyebrows were knitted in exasperation. Then, they slid downward, forming a sloping V of pure hate.


“Are you Vandemark, Langley Vandemark?” she asked, trembling.


“Why yes.” I said, startled.


“Don’t you people realize that we are dreadfully busy, with our backs against the wall. I can’t be running around to every pub in London looking for you….”


“Are you C. Mumpy?” I blurted.


“Yes. Lt. Clare Mumpy, from QMS, and I should have picked you up a half….”


“But I was there…” I reasoned, trying to reconstruct my movements for her, catching glimpses of her through the successive waves of emotion that passed over her young trembling face. As I wound down my soliloquy of transportation woes from New York dockside to London pub, she seemed to deflate before my eyes, perhaps even losing some of her physical stature.

Suddenly, as if emotion had temporarily aged her, she seemed to be quite young, no more than eighteen. Her dark brown hair was tied up in an unattractive bun; in the commotion and arguments it had become undone and stray wisps, like strands from a gorgon’s head, were flopping about her forehead and behind small elf pointed ears. Her eyes, a pale slate gray with sparks of dark brown sprinkled haphazardly around the iris like broken spokes, were darting over my face as if to take in the essence of an American.

Perhaps, she had heard about the American animal, so alike to the British yet so different, but never seen an actual specimen. She looked at me vaguely, but with a certain pointed rudeness, as if searching for a family feature we held in common.


“You know,” she said more civilly, “I lived in your Cambridge Massachusetts for a year, when I was fourteen.”


“Really?”


“Yes. My father’s an Oxford Don ---- Greek philosophy. He spent a year or two teaching at Radcliffe.” She stopped for a moment. I thought of my abortive year at Harvard, of warm spring days on the Cambridge Common, sitting in the shorn grass with biology and chemistry books at my feet that would never really be read, brimming over with the hot knowledge that anything could be done if you held certain things tightly enough, if you grasped, with a desperate measure of strength, that essential part of the self that if lost, would diminish you to a fine speck, and held onto that remnant with the last full measure of devotion.


“Odd,” she continued, “you don’t look like any American I’ve ever met.”


“What did you expect?”


“Mmmmmm, so hard to say, really. So when are the rest of you coming over…” Noise from the bar drowned her voice, and I strained to hear the same questions I had heard since my arrival.


Then, a great overhead crash, and before I knew it I was on the ground in a pile with several other patrons, a collection of stools, chairs, and broken glass. I stood up before I should have; I was lightheaded and weak and looked around. Most of the people at the tables were still in their seats, but their faces were white with fear. Those of us sitting at the bar were thrown off our stools, and the damage, all told, was minimal. I had a gash just below my hairline. I tore off a corner of a table cloth and slung the strip just above my temple crooked, Spirit of ’76 style.


“Do you want to go to hospital for that?” she asked, knitting her brows again. I noticed there was a fine network of lines on her young, prominent forehead. As she leaned into me to adjust the bandage; she smelled faintly of peppermint.


Someone came into the pub and told the curious crowd where the hit was, several blocks down, almost near the Thames. No doubt the bomb was intended for someplace else, since a raid wasn’t taking place, but planes flying overhead obey a hideous logic all their own…


I started to stumble about, and thought I heard a fife and drum and I felt (and you may think I’m maudlin) so utterly American at that moment of minor blood loss. I was the first American wounded in the European theater of war, or so I believed. And I remembered, as blood soaked through my minuteman tourniquet, that the people surrounding me in this pub burned the White House in 1814.

And then I recalled, as I swooned to the ground, that slaves were forced to build that house, or at least quarry the stones that built it, and then I felt a not so demur feminine hand rapping-tapping at my dozing face… trying to wake up a portion of Langley Vandemark that should have been left in eternal slumber…

CLUTTER, 2

Being older than Homer, and able to stand on my own, Mother, upon reaching the steps of our brownstone, plucked me out of the carriage first, setting me nimbly down on the third step of the stoop. I bobbed up and down, impatient and ornery.

I strutted about the step, making various animal noises I had learned: the gentle cooing of the pigeons that perched and roosted outside my window, their multi-colored, luminous feathers a counterpoint to the dull, dun colored stalagmite droppings they deposited on the stone rain shelf. The yap-yap of the ferocious dachshund that Mrs. Schultz, our next-door neighbor, would walk in the wee hours of the morning, when the little runt encountered a larger dog. The plaintive howl of the neighborhood cat, Lady Elizabeth, when she was in heat, rubbing her hindquarters suggestively on the wrought iron railing that delineated the sidewalk from the front yard. I rendered this veritable Ark of animal noises in high strutting fashion, like a solider on dress parade, legs marching in prancing, exaggerated goose steps, arms swinging demonically at my sides.



Halfway through my martial calisthenics, Mother freed Homer from the carriage.


“Look at your brother, Homer,” she said with pride, “he’s going to be a solider some day.” Homer cooed in response, a soft, understated pigeon trill. “He’s going to be a great solider. A great officer, like his grandfather, my father, who fought at Antietam. Twenty-thousand men fell on that awful day. But my Daddy survived,” she told Homer proudly and then looked my way, casting an appraising glance, “I think your brother is made of the same stuff as Daddy.”


Later I learned that maternal Grandfather Franklin Pierce Rogerson was a comparatively lucky survivor of the Battle of Antietam.


He was a captain in the New York 41st Regiment out of Cold Spring Harbor, and it was his first commission, his first trip south, and indeed his first trip outside of the State of New York. He was one of those green officers sent to the field with inadequate training. His Sergeant was the de facto commander and Grandfather Rogerson would quietly seek his advice on almost all matters, and the Sergeant was enough of a solider by trade to never break ranks and show that he was the true authority over all those young Cold Spring Harbor boys, all those oystermen’s sons, who were better at holding shell rakes in their hands than firearms, and who tooled around in the sheltered bays and coves of the Long Island Sound, whose gentle lapping waters, although salt, sometimes froze over in winter.


But a storm was unleashed at Antietam, and Grandfather Rogerson marched bravely forth into the field, his service revolver in one hand, his upraised sword in the other, his Sergeant directly in front of him, and his reluctant men dallying behind. In front, down the valley and one hundred yards to the south, several hundred boys from southern Missouri, who had most likely never heard of an oyster, were loading their cannon for a torrential barrage. As the first bowling ball sized shells began to fall around my maternal Grandfather, spewing up divots of Antietam turf until the balls struck oystermen flesh, all in a moment – before he could think --- a cannon ball landed square on into the head of Grandfather’s Sergeant, bursting it like an overripe watermelon. A shard of skull bone flew back like shrapnel and lodged in Grandfather’s shoulder.


On that day, twenty thousand Americans lay dead or dying on the battlefield, the greatest mass blood letting on American soil, but my maternal Grandfather was fine. A trifle dazed, perhaps, and certainly shaken, but the fundamentals of his mind and spirit were sound.


He began to shake a week later, when he commenced the laborious task of reforming the unit. He hoped the tremors would lessen with time, but if anything they worsened, and he began to scream about a darkness coming over his eyes, and black out for a few minutes, at first, but eventually up to a half hour.


A doctor examined him and concluded that he wayward bone fragment lodged in a nerve in Grandfather’s shoulder, causing reduced blood flow to his upper body and brain, precipitating unpredictable spells of fainting. Poor hapless Granddaddy was subject to the shakes and blackouts the rest of his life.


He moved to Washington Heights, which was still rural after the Civil War and well into the beginning of the twentieth century. As apartment houses began to dot the landscape of northern Manhattan, enclosing his farm, he was always proud to say that he was the last man to have a woodshed on the island of Manhattan.


“Sometimes qualities skip a generation,” Mother told Homer, “but sometimes they don’t. But nothings to stop my Daddy’s good traits from appearing in you or your brother. I can see it now, just like you can see sprouts blossom on a fruit tree in spring.”


Mother always misjudged fundamentals. And from that erroneous foundation, set out on flights of fancy. It was left to us to heartlessly destroy her castles in the sky. We did it with aplomb.


When I saw our avenue the next day, that ancient tree gone.


One could also begin here:
 When I came home from the war, from my war, the Second World War, all I could do, after so many dislocations was to allow that drift, that stream of sober inevitability to hold endless sway. I let go the tension that had nearly ground my nerves to dust, and found the release after much hand wringing, such endless gnashing of my jaw, such incessant tossing between my sweat stained sheets. I let it go. I just let it all go! I had no Antietam, no sustained blood letting, but other fantastically generated birds of doom lurked in the trees, biding their time.


When I came home from the war long standing and hidden ills assumed an existence of their very own. They had become their own apotheosis – animated and alive. And the gravest symptom of this disease was that objects and symbols, usually so cleverly segregated, could no longer be so easily teased apart. My field of vision, customarily so acute in its depth, had become a blunt, ineffectual, unaccountably blearily.


One could also begin here:


There was another element of nagging concern. It is that extra shadow that I seem to possess like some inalienable birthright.


If flesh is heir to a thousand natural shocks, then my massive frame receives a double portion. A triple share, of unnatural confluences of shocks, of hits, of elements and infernal influences that seem to guide my errant life. It is as if, beyond my own limited sphere of somatic and psychic control, on the periphery of my meager consciousness, on that dark border zone were I end and it begins, there, there is the pocked and scarred battleground. And it is sly! And it is cunning! It is doggedly persistent in its attempts to encroach on my already faltering sense of self, to hurl its dark noose around the minute speck of quickly dimming light that I so generously label Langley, Langley Vandemark. Langley On the Mark!


Watch the dimming spark. Be wary of its trickster’s schemes. Why must every ray of celestial soul light that vaults from our single, solitary being be accompanied by an equal and opposite measure of the Shadow, that dark brother that creeps across the bright landscape of the psyche. The spoiler! The little tarty home wrecker! I play my cards, I have the good sportsmanship to lay down my hand for all to see, but It lays its hand, a hand full of cards that cancel my efforts, out beyond the border zone of perception. It blocks me. It limits my possible moves. All it knows how to do is how to step on feet, to betray, to negate, to…


But one could also begin here:


At other times it was as if the veil had been removed from my eyes. I saw events and circumstances as if a cloudy cataract had been suddenly burnt and purged away from my soul’s cornea.


When I came home from the war I cast a spell upon myself. What could be revealed was revealed. Where there were holes in my story, I simply let the cracks remain where they were. If streaming white light pulsed through the chinks, who was I to fill the gap? Not every chasm can be filled. Not every dull hole should be plugged.


One could also begin here:


Here is a gap, there is a white flash, and here, the bridge: my father’s family was actually black. Through some fortuitous selective breeding, re-locations, purposeful or accidental disruptions, my family had “passed” for white since the presidency of U.S. Grant or thereabouts. Actually, it’s hard to settle on an exact date when coal black faded to lily white. In my imagination there was never a clear boundary but a succession of wavering stages, fluttering through the generations, snaking upward, paling with each mile north of the Mason-Dixon Line, accumulating more money and power with each lighter gradation, with each lie, with each measure of forgetfulness.


I was stationed in Alabama just prior to my tour of duty in England. It was there that a creeping sensation of dread, a guilty moisture laden cloud which always hung over me seemed ready to downpour. My divided allegiances festered and seemed destined to leap frog backward and haunt me. I could sense it somewhere out beyond the perimeter fence along a tobacco road, in a shack inadequately shaded from the broiling sun by a scraggly tupelo tree, some long lost relative seemed destined to knock on my door. He would try, with a birthright as legitimate as any disrupted European royal line forced to live in exile, to reclaim one of his own; to rejoin a limb that had lopped itself off through artifice, deceit, and garden variety fear.


But no, that knock never came. But my theories seemed to confirm themselves when the first batch of “Colored” trooped were billeted adjacent to us, and I saw, with anxious eyes, that they were better than us. Our smug and superior stance, when measured and weighed alongside their selfless determination to be better than us through negation, was an unspoken accusation cast over  all. For me, slouching in my den of secrets, the pronouns them and we, had a peculiar permeability. So all seemed lost.  So much was gone…

CLUTTER: a novella

In 2001, when I was first fooling around with "serious" writing, I wrote a novella based on the Collyer  brothers, New York City's famous hoarding recluses.  Of course, their story is common New York lore.  So it came as no surprise to me that in the years following someone wrote a play  about the brothers called Clutter, and recently E.L. Doctorow wrote a novel called Homer and Langley.  This work has be chosen for next year's freshmen reading book (i.e., all Cornell freshmen read it).  So, here is my contribution to Collyer brother legend. It departs significantly from their story: there is the London Blitz, Gigantism, miscegenation, dips into loopy and not very serious post-modern moments of whimsey, and sundry depatures from narrative norms.  But all the while, it keeps its sense of proportion, which I hope you appreciate and enjoy

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"All men by nature love the senses irrespective of their utility, and predominantly above the rest, the sense of sight.”



- Aristotle, The Metaphysics, Book One.

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ONE

One may as well begin here:


When I came home from the war outside had become inside and inside had become outside. Emptiness had become clutter and clutter had become emptiness.


What went wrong, you would be justified to ask? The fault, it seems, was a mistake in apprehension. It was all so easily avoidable, but situations careened out of control; what should have been tidy became unkempt. What should have remained broad funneled into something narrow. The problem was not psychological, as many believed, but metaphysical; the problem was strictly taxonomic: it was about borders; it was about particulars and universals, matter and form, actuality and potentiality, being and becoming, change and the changeless. The problem was about what makes a thing a thing and what makes nothing nothing.


One may as well begin here.


“Why, they are twins Mrs. Vandemark!”


“What makes you think so, Mrs. Cavendish?”


“Well,” Mrs. Cavendish held us up for mutual inspection, one child perched in each of her plump arms. She screwed her face up with what was for her, no doubt, extraordinary concentration, “for all the usual reasons, I suppose.” Her eyes scanned from me to Homer and Homer to me rapidly, surveying possible features in common: casting a critical glance at eye color, hair texture, the comparative shape of our dumpling shaped neo-natal skulls. “Why,” she continued, “I would believe they are twins from the very fact that that Homer and Langley share the same nose!” As she said this, Mrs. Cavendish pointed her face to each of us, indicating which child was Homer and which was me.


“Mrs. Cavendish,” Mother beamed naturally, “that is Langley and that is Homer.”


“Oh, goodness gracious,” Mrs. Cavendish chuckled, as she handed me to mother. She kept Homer suspended on her wide hip like a grocery store parcel. “That just clinches it for me! They’re identical twins. Clyde, come over here and look at Mrs. Vandemark’s twins!”


Clyde Cavendish, who operated a newsstand down the street from our brownstone residence, was bundling up parcels of periodicals that had been delivered at the corner. He sauntered over to us and stood behind his portly wife. He clucked critically at her useless enthusiasms.


“Good morning, Mrs. Vandemark.” My Mother nodded in response. “What is the fresh fuss, Harriet?”


“Well,” she exhaled mightily, “you never told me that Mrs. Vandemark had twins?”


“I was just telling your wife, Mr. Cavendish…” Mother began but Mr. Cavendish interrupted her.


“Why Harriet, you silly bean, Homer was born a full year and a half after Langley.”


“Two years,” Mother corrected.


“Two years. There! I have to mind the stand, now. You mind your observations, Harriet. Good day, Mrs. Vandemark.” Clyde turned heel and with newspapers in his outstretched arms and returned the half block to his stand. Mrs. Cavendish’s face puckered.


“My husband can be such a prune sometimes,” was all Mrs. Cavendish managed to say. She held Homer up to her face, her features softening under the diffused stare of my baby brother. She made nonsensical noises and cooed only inches away from his fat baby face.


“I suppose,” she said, snapping back to an adult tone of voice, “I can see a difference in the eyes. Little Homer’s eyes don’t focus as well as Langley’s. So I suppose that shows that Langley is older.” Her disappointment was evident.


Mrs. Cavendish handed Homer back to Mother, who dutifully placed us both in the dual perambulator she and Father had recently purchased. She tucked me in first, wrapping a blue blanket that smelled mildly of peppermint and talcum powder around my baby torso; she then tucked Homer in the other chamber of the bicameral stroller, swaddling him in a yellow blanket. Pulling down the wind hood of the stroller about halfway to shelter us from the cool, early spring breeze, Mother wished Mrs. Cavendish a pleasant day, and resumed our stroll down Broadway.


As we rounded a corner near our brownstone, a city crew was preparing to fell an oak tree. Our block, at that bucolic time, was a pleasant, little trafficked side street, sheltered on both sides by mighty arboreal giants, their overhanging limbs forming a pleasant lattice of branches over the street, peppering the avenue with a broken field of green-lemon yellow light and deeper patches of dark forest green shade, all set in motion by a slight breeze, setting the street world in a flutter, a flurry of rustling, a changing, riotous checkerboard pattern of shifting lights and darks.


“Well look Homer, Langley, those men are taking that tree down.” Mother exclaimed, briefly stopping the perambulator at the curb.


“Why?” I asked.


“Well, its probably diseased,” she answered simply.


Several burly men in rolled up shirt sleeves and rough canvas work pants were affixing a massive metal ring, that really looked like an over-sized caliper, around the broad trunk of the oak and using that as a steady platform, running a metal ladder up the height of the monster to the first of the arm of thick cross branches.


My body, on that Edenic day, was in a drowsy, pleasant, supine posture. The workmen, with burly, bulging forearms, were manipulating the gleaming ring as one particularly adept worker climbed to the crown of the tree with a  saw. Mother swung the perambulator around, away from the scene of amputation, and closed the hood of the carriage, its black, thin, material stretched taut across the two lateral metal bars, like black crepe bunting around a coffin, and I dug deep in, hidden. And I should have remained hidden. But instead of shrinking from the world I grew outlandishly, quite literally large. Since that day, it seemed, the task of hiding myself become implausibly difficult. Somehow, someway, gigantism became my unalterable fate. Kicking my feet in the hidden pocket of the baby carriage, blind to the world around me, hiding on that day seemed all too real a possibility.


On that fine early spring day, nothing seemed amiss. The world was perfectly centered and poised like tiny bubbles of air in the liquid of a carpenter’s plain. The street, to my toddler’s malleable mind, the perfect escarpment for eternity to dwell. But in the midst of harmony I could hear the pleasant hiss of a metal saw cutting its jagged teeth through the dry, old growth wood.

Mothers & Sons, XIX

Servi was drinking coffee at a cafe while reading the novel I Promessi Sposi. He looked up for a moment and was surprised to see Claudia and Father Roberto standing in front of him.



“There you are, damn it,” Claudia said without breath. “Do you have Paulo?”


“No,” Servi answered, laying the book on the table. “He isn’t at school?”


“No,” Claudia explained, “nor at the rectory.”


The three then discussed a search strategy. Servi was to check down by the river, where the boy often enjoyed walking along the retaining wall, but decided instead to head toward the Vatican.





He found the boy on a bench in the Sistine Chapel, not looking at the ceiling like the herd of tourists, but the floor, which was scuffed and scored from the footwear of four continents.


“How did you get in here, Paulo?” Servi asked, sitting beside the boy. “Admission costs an arm and leg?”


“That’s not my real name,” the boy answered sullenly. “It is Cosmo.”


“Alright, Cosmo,” Servi answered. “How did you get in here?”


“I slipped in with a bunch of people.”


“Well,” Servi answered, grasping the boy’s shoulder. “Let’s get back. Your mother and Father Roberto are worried sick.”


“Claudia,” the boy answered firmly. “She isn’t my mother. She’s Claudia and she stole me…”


“Alright,” Servi said gently. “That’s fine, Cosmo. How about we get out from under this fresco and straighten this whole thing out?”


The boy then began to quietly cry, but the sound gathered momentum, and in the cavernous space, echoed off the walls and ceilings. The guards, who constantly hush loud tourists, said nothing to Servi as he carried the lad out the door; for even they knew that a child must cry even in the most sanctified of places.

Mothers & Sons, XVIII

Servi allowed Claudia to take command on the couch that evening. She was rough, pinching and grinding and taking him at odd angles, grasping and releasing him in a firm and unshakable embrace. She bit his shoulder and Servi thought she had broken the skin. He placed his finger on the dent, but the liquid was only a pool of her warm and sticky saliva, enlivened with some invigorating substance which felt to Servi’s fingers like blood.



Servi awoke wrapped in a haze. His head felt as if it was slit open. He was alone on the couch, surrounded by empty bottles of cheap red wine. Before his eyes were fully opened, he realized that someone was waving a piece of paper in front of his nose.


“Did he write this to you?” Claudia said in Italian, holding Paulo’s note in a quaking hand. In the tussle of last night’s stern lust, it had fallen from Servi’s pants to the floor.


“Yes,” Servi answered, sitting up with great difficulty.


“The little bastard,” she hissed. “I grind my ass to a nub to feed and cloth that little prick, and he tries to disown me to strangers…”


“Claudia, quiet down,” Servi whispered. “He’ll hear.”


“He’s already at day school,” she screamed, pounding her foot against the floor. “I came back here to ask you about this note without him here. He wrote this!”


“I already told you he did.”


“Son of a bitch,” Claudia turned and stormed out the door.

Mothers and Sons, XIV

Sometime in the night Servi awoke to crying. Claudia was next to him snoring lightly. So Servi rose from the couch and entered Paulo’s room. The boy was in a little bed tangled in sheets and blankets. Servi extracted the boy and sat on a chair, cradling him close to his neck. In the dim light cast from the street lamp, Servi could see his tight, closed face, and an expression of wan anticipation evident even in fitful sleep.



When the boy quieted down Servi placed him gently on the bed, straightened the cover and the sheet and seeing that he was quiet, walked gently away.






“Shit, I’m so late,” Claudia hissed, hurriedly dressing. “ Servi watched her from the couch. She kept giving Paulo instructions and the boy grunted in the next room. Servi could hear him rustling about, grunting, stamping his foot, whimpering.


“Can you take him to the day school Servi?” Claudia finally asked. “I’m at my wits end. I can’t get him there and get to work on time.”


“Claudia, Paulo is your son alright?”


“Of course he is,” she snapped in rapid English, so the boy wouldn’t understand. “He wants another mother. Who the fuck doesn’t? He wants another mother who doesn’t have to harass him to get him out the door and go to work. Well too damn bad! We all get the mother we get… the mother we deserve... case closed…” she was so angry, that halfway through she switched from English to rapid Italian.


“Servi,” she continued on a more subdued note. “Can you please take Paulo to school?” Servi nodded and she was gone.