As he reached Broadway the crowds thickened. People were spilling out of night clubs, cabs clogged the streets and sidewalks, drunks staggered on the curbs; wealthy white people from midtown and downtown mingled with the affluent Harlem coloreds and poor street folk. I had lost Father. I stood at the corner of Broadway and 93rd Street bewildered. I had never realized that people remained on the streets so late.
I began a defeated retreat toward home.
Heading north on Broadway at first I thought it must have been another man. Seeing a colored woman on his arm, him holding her with intentions obvious, was an exercise in cognitive dissonance the likes of which I had never experienced again.
As I entered our brownstone I did not immediately return to my bedroom. I peered into Mother’s room. She was sleeping soundly, angelically. The hall grandfather clock was lightly ticking as if its pendulum ball bearings were cushioned by a layer of water.
Mother, you see, was myopic both ocularly and maritally. I’m afraid she passed her lithesome frame, weak and brown eyes to Homer. I received Father’s bulk. Eventually, as Father left, and Mother shrank, Homer became my charge.
He was only mildly short sighted at first. Mother doted on him in the early days. Father took him to specialists in and around the Metropolitan region. But the darkness grew; the tunnel of myopia narrowed. By the time Mother realized Father was not at conferences Homer was nearly blind, Father had decamped, and Mother had cordoned off parts of the house for herself alone.
The Vandemark world grew darker by degrees. The world narrowed. There was a single, dark hallway where I could catch an occasional glimpse of her. She moved with distraction; she appeared to limp. Her hair was in disarray. I stood there with Homer’s hand in mine and watched her maneuver about in her own internal exile.
She had barricaded the windows to keep out the sun. A few servants, disloyal, lazy and thieving scoundrels, ran the house during Father’s increasingly lengthy absences. Dark wood railings, banisters and floors, uncleaned for months, then years, absorbed light. Dry stale air bleached the house of color, and drained the pigments from curtains and tapestries.
The books in the library became brittle; their leaves yellowed and cracked and blew to the floor. The giant central staircase bisecting the front hall, lined with Italian marble, once bright as pearl, was covered in green mold and crisscrossed with deeply etched black fissures. The overhead skylight, which once allowed brilliant beams of sunshine to bake the Turkish carpet at the landing of the stairs, fading its oriental patterns and designs as if it had been wiped by a rude wet hand, was clogged with a black screen of accumulated debris.
Seeing Mother’s small form move from room to room filled me with dread, and the leaching of color from our existence seemed only to hasten Homer’s blindness.
“What do you see?” I would ask him, holding up a porcelain dish.
“I don’t know really,” he replied in his high voice, squinting “something round.”
“What color is it?”
“Pink,” he said.
“No, it doesn’t have a color. It’s white,” I said.
“White’s a color,” he said.
“No, white and black are the absence of color,” I said.
“I don’t believe it,” he said stubbornly, his thin face twisted in frustration. He stood in front of me, slightly disheveled. He was eleven or twelve. His skin was a sickly yellow hue in the gray light of the house. His weak eyes were trying to focus on me.
“Let get some air. It’s stuffy in here,” I said, taking his slim hand in mine and leading him out through the hall, down the steps of the stoop, and to the sidewalk.
“Where are we going?”
“To the park. I wanna see some trees,” I said.
“Ahhh,” he complained, “I don’t wanna go Lang.”
“Too bad, we’re going.”
I pulled him down along the street toward the park. Out in the sunshine he looked less yellow but more pasty. His light curly hair was falling down around his ears. He could not see well even in day light and I felt compelled to constantly test him.
“What’s that? What’s that? What’s that?”
“Ahhh,” he squealed, “leave it alone, Langley. I don’t wanna leave the house.”
“If you want to see things Homer, you’re gonna to have to try. You’re gonna have to practice to strengthen your eyes”
“Its no good, Lang. If I can’t see I can’t see. It’s not something I can help.” I looked at him and saw tears roll down the hummocks of his little cheeks.
I knew he was right. I took hold of his arm and pulled him down on the grass. The murky waters of the Meer lay ahead, reflecting the building behind it darkly. Some children were throwing a baseball in front of us. They were my age, perhaps slightly older. Their ball got loose and rolled in front of Homer’s foot.
“Hey,” the biggest one yelled, “throw that back.” I moved to hurl it toward them. Then another said.
“I don’t want them to touch my ball.” I heard him say a name to characterize us that I had never heard before. I stood up immediately and walked toward them. I thought I heard the name again. I did not wait to hear it a third time.
I was a big boy for my age. All I had to do was to ball up my fist and swing my weight around and hit the biggest boy in the nose. He screamed as blood poured out both his nostrils. Another rushed me with the bat. I took a hit on the left arm. Before he could pivot to swing again I punched him with my blunt fist in the side on the head just below his temple. He fell down on the grass and twitched. Then he slowly staggered up. The third boy had run away by this time. I could see his sprinting figure heading toward the tree line. The other two quickly gained their wits and joined him. I walked back to Homer.
“What happened,” he asked breathlessly, “What did those boys say that made you beat ‘em up so? You did beat ‘em up, didn’t you Lang?”
“Come on Homer. It don’t make no difference,” I said, hoisting him up to his feet, “don’t be so curious”. I stood there looking at him. His yellow curls hung down over his cloudy, searching eyes. I picked up the ball and with all my might hurled it toward the milky sky.
SEVEN
… When I came back from the war I felt a tumbling sensation. I would often check the ground beneath my feet to make sure that the soil of Harlem was still the stable platform it had been in 1942.
I began to realize that the finely wrapped layers of my psyche were being stripped away, torn asunder and trampled upon. When I came home from the war things and symbols could no longer be so easily teased apart. I could no longer choose, with the certainty that I always possessed, between two mutually exclusive and polar opposites.
When I came home from the war I NEVER wanted to let my guard down. I peered from around the corner and looked at the little hollow spaces I had fashioned for myself and was amazed at the incongruity between the created and the natural, the soul and the body, my bulk versus Homer’s wisp. …
Potentiality: my mother, a petite woman much younger than Father, always smelled vaguely of peppermint soap on her thin wrists. She would take Homer and I by the hand and go with Father to Grand Central Station to see him off to various medical conferences, (whose attendance, it seems, was mandatory), in Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, even St. Louis. Of course I realized later that he never left New York.
He always insisted that we go home immediately on hugging him beneath that vast roof, the smoky light filtering through the upper windows of that beautiful nexus of embarkation and departure that says, in so many profound and significant ways, that there is no such thing as humanity, but humanity in process and in transformation. Once Mother, Homer and I boarded a subway uptown he would bid a hasty retreat downtown, to the other woman.
Father had an unchallenging medical practice mid-town. He had time to spare, and that combined fatally with the fact that he was the type of man who forty years ago women found irresistibly attractive: he was older than his appearance, even in photographs in his early twenties during his residency. His temples were already spotted with gray hair; the lines on his face had deepened appreciatively: grooves beneath his mournful, pale blue eyes, scorings on his broad forehead, and light crows feet in the transverse angles of his eyes.
He was unusually tall, even taller than me, an odd enough occurrence for Americans who tend to sprout an inch or two taller than their progenitors. He had long, lanky limbs, narrow, slender shoulders and remained wiry and robust all his days. And the last I saw of him, he was standing, framed as it were, in the doorway of his and Mother’s bedroom.
I was perched on the staircase, my body just below his line of sight, only the top most portion of my head and my beedy eyes jutting above the lavender runner on the flat step of the last stair of the marble stairway. He was distinguished looking, attired in some sort of dark evening suit.
Mother was just out of view in the interior of the bedroom. I could picture her with minute detail in my mind: she is in bed, white night cap perched low over her fragile brow, wisps of blond hair spilling out of the cap, a wrap around night gown closed tightly over her slim shoulders, pale, tired, perhaps one of her reoccurring migraines beginning an introductory salvo of stabbing, throbbing pain in her right temple.
“But Edgar do you really need to go out and take a house call this late at night?”
“Yes, dear, I told you this particular patient is extremely ill.”
“But can’t one of your associates make the call? One of the younger doctors?”
“No darling, I’m afraid its out of the question. This case is particularly difficult and I need to go. I have to give this woman my individual attention.”
There was silence.
“Darling, I can’t predict when or with what frequency my patients will become ill.” More silence. Father was looking in Mother’s general direction, and I imagine she was turning over in the canopied bed, lifting the quilt and tapering the edges around her slim neck. Father rapidly turned toward the stairway. I hid behind a hamper left by our careless maid on the landing.
Slipping out the door I turned to the left and spied Father’s retreating figure walking at a brisk pace toward midtown. He was not taking a cab. He was not riding the subway. I followed him at a safe distance, pacing myself, placing visual obstacles between us.
The Boar’s Loins was crowded with post-blitz crowd. Customarily after a raid the pubs filled to capacity. I pushed a hole through the throng and found a small table at the back.
I returned with the ales and sat down next to Clare. She had removed her coat and the small vest she wore over her blouse, which was white with little ruffles around the wrists and neck. The press of the people forced me to lean into her. She smelled vaguely of soap, not a perfumed variety, but of peppermint cleanser. I thought I felt her lean toward me. I could feel the protrusion of her lean ribs against my flanks. Lesley was saying something to her. She had to repeat it over the din.
“You must come up to Crotchford Downs. We can’t stay for the whole holiday, of course, Gavin must be back in London on Tuesday, but we could have a pleasant three or four days. All the flowers are just coming in, and it would be nice to get away from London.”
Clare nodded her head. The foamy ale made a moustache above her lip. I handed her a napkin and pointed to my upper lip as if I were a sympathetic mirror.
The Boar’s Loins was decorated with a profusion of American flags and red, white and blue bunting. They hung in clusters around the molding, were draped over the doors, rained down heavily from railings and abutments. There were too many, for on my innumerable trips for additional pints I kept getting snagged in them. Hands would slap me on the back, congratulating me on my American-ness, spilling dribbles and dollops of beer on the floor, the patrons, the seats, the flags…
Clare was getting drunk. She was slurring her words and leaning toward me, resting her hand on my leg, and allowing her body to lean lazily against mine.
“Tell me more about Crotchford Downs,” I asked.
“Oh, you’ll jolly well like it,” Gavin replied, blowing smoke out of his nose, “a positively English country experience for you Langley, you shan’t be disappointed, even in wartime. Acres and acres of bland, indistinguishable moorlands… country cottages occupied by stooped rustics that speak an archaic argot even I can’t fully decipher… hounds, horses, foxes, heraldry, suits of armor, castles in ruin, bogs, clay pits, inexplicable cold drafts, mysterious overcooked meats… I can assure you, old boy, your expectations shan’t be dashed.
Gavin paused, drank some ale, and continued, “Why, our dear Clare here in not unfamiliar with Crotchford Downs. Her father and mine roomed together at Merton, you know, read Greek or Latin or Hebrew… which was it?” he didn’t wait to hear the answer. “She used to come up on holiday every now and again when I was growing up.”
“Yes, its true” Clare slurred drunkenly, “And its just as d-dreadful as Gavin proclaims… it like a bloody outdoor cave… the sun never shines… there a per-perpetual mist… and those damned wild hounds…
“Wild hounds?” I asked.
“Yes, try as we may we can never fully eradicate the beasts, I’m afraid.” Gavin explained. “They’re something of a local oddity. Perfectly harmless I’m assured. Think of them as just a bit of local color. Some sort of medieval holdover”
Lesley, who had drunk too much for her light frame, was sliding against Gavin and falling down below the level of the table in a drunken snooze.
“Well, time to take my little cherub home. Upsy girl.” Gavin hoisted her to her feet. I helped him twirl her around and point her toward the door.
“You’ll see Clare home safely, won’t you old boy?”
“Of course”
“Splendid. See you both in the morning.”
Clare walked beside me on the deserted street. Her flat was far from the pub. We headed from Charing Cross to Leicester Square, up toward Covent Garden, and finally, Chancery Lane. She silently entwined her arm in mine. Somewhere to the south a single spot light scanned the low cloud cover. A few balloons shaped like aircraft hung low and gray over the horizon. In the blackout conditions London was dark with a lunar stillness.
“I didn’t think you liked me,” I said softly, looking down on her shawled head.
“I don’t think I do, really.”
“Well perhaps I should go to my flat then,” I said tensely.
“No,” she said, “you can come up to my flat.”
“Why don’t you like me, if I may ask?”
“Its nothing personal, really, I’m just not sure if I fancy any men.”
“Men that you meet? Or men in general?”
“Oh,” she said, getting more sober by the minute, “in general I should say. I fancy they have their uses, but in general they’re pests. They always stay around too long. They always talk too much. Or, frustratingly enough --- too little. And then there is their physical needs. Dear God, they’re just too sharp, too pointed to have any real substance behind them. Its just a flash of powder in the pan. No… I find most of the men I meet fall well below the mark.”
“The mark of what?” I asked.
“Oh, my expectations, I suppose. Its just so tawdry and quick.”
“You’re very young, Miss Mumpy, to have such acute observations about the opposite sex.”
Her flint eyes gazed up at me with a comic twinkle.
“I’ve had many lovers Langley, even though I’m only twenty.”
I could feel heat collecting around my collar. Sweat was dripping from my hairline to my brow.
We walked along sometime in silence until we reached her door.
“Don’t get me wrong Langley,” she said, looking at me full in the face, “I do fancy you very much. But it will never run deeper than that.”
The blackout shade was drawn tight but I could tell it was morning from the street noise. Clare lay atop me, curled up on my chest, one slim leg resting on my muscular right thigh, the other curled under my left calf. Her tussled brown hair was spread over my chest. I could feel the slight stirring movement of her breathing and the angular pinch of her jutting ribs in my side. I gently rolled her off of me.
If you took her singularly, part for part, she looked unattractive, even sickly. The pointed ear tips, the gray dull eyes, the green tinted skin, the teeth a polished pointed yellow, the sallow, thin, girlish frame. But that very composition, arranged as it was, appealed and roused me. That seed within me was seeking out some riper, more fertile confine than my hulking frame to prosper. I could smell the odors of the night, the sweat, the musty breath, and I climbed on top of her, wrapping my arms around her fragile frame, feeling her move, accept me, and stir to meet my motions…
SIX
At tea time I would emerge from my work-cave, often dripping with moisture to mingle with the assembled cast of characters from the Supply team. There was Reginald Motley, a vacuous but enthusiastic lad from some midland collier town with buck teeth and powdery dandruff peppering his shoulders and lapels. He was fixated on all matters sexual, and he had an odd habit of using exact clinical terms for body parts and functions instead of slang. This gave his erotic discourses a stilted, perverse flavor that it would not otherwise have had. For instance: “It was all vaginal intercourse, old boy, vaginal intercourse all the way!”
There was Sandra Shagsby, a passably pretty young girl of twenty-four or five from the West End. Her accent, a thick and plastery Cockney, was an incomprehensible series of guttural stops and starts. I do not think she ever said an “h” in her short, sweet nubile life. She had a lazy left eye that made her seem subtly lascivious at all times. Her passes at me over wedges of black market lemon and cubes of pre-war sugar and the clinking of chipped porcelain became a minor scandal for a short time. Then I realized, with the kind of relief one gets when one reaches the rock-bottom of a truly simple person, that flirtation was how she encountered the world.
Then there was Gavin Budge, of course, his blond down glistening as he stood by the window, a sunburst breaking through the steel gray winter sky, illuminating him like an androgynous angel --- all soft angles and broad planes without visible edges or snag points. He was beautiful to behold. He was the sort of upper crust sexual chameleon that only the British public schools produce in unending quantities.
He was so cavalier about his masculinity that he was effeminate in his mannerisms, tossing a hand unselfconsciously in the air to make a point, or thrusting a finger into the sky while balancing a cup and saucer, discussing supply problems, manifests, invoices, requisitions, shortages or war strategy as if it were a production of Swan Lake
And then my little Clare, my gnome, would stand next to Gavin, her brown hair falling below the top line of her ears, concealing their points, a crumb of biscuit carelessly perched on the soft dimple above her upper lip, her green-white hand grasping the cup, steadying the saucer, her silence revealing not the reserve and haughtiness I imagined when we met, but a sweet shyness, a gentle girlish repose.
I would emerge from my lair for my tea as a stock character, the bulky solid American. Perhaps I was bursting from my uniform? Perhaps my command of space was so sub-consciously New World that it displaced the air in the room. For Clare seemed to shy away from the slightest contact with me, even at my periphery. This recoiling only made me move bulgingly forward, to try and jostle her into awareness of my body. When I entered the room at tea she appeared to butt up against Gavin for support.
I know now, now that I wander among a dozen pianos, piles of newspapers, acres of old clothes, that I used Eros to replace impulses that never really existed. I wanted a sheltering roof for a certain layer of detritus foam that sat in my bowels – that had been my unconscious substitute for a heart.
There was also a little hollow niche that sat somewhere above my sternum and ended at my breast-plate. I filled that spot with all sorts of things, mundane and extraordinary. But what should have actually gone there never did. For why should anyone hide from the world? Perhaps, as some people are born without a limb, or with faulty eyes, or a shrunken foot, others are born without the faculty for expansion. Perhaps the unfortunate few reach a proverbial dead end when they reach the tip of the birth canal. No more outward grasping. No more gain or loss.
After several hundred cups of tea, several dozen biscuits and small pies, Budge and I became close chums. We warmed a few pub stools, threw darts at a pitted cork target, licked the foam from innumerable pints, and gradually lessened the divide between the States and the Mother Country. He even invited me to his flat to meet his erstwhile girlfriend, a mousy petite peroxide blond with a button nose and close set green eyes, named Lesley Tuncless.
“You mustn’t listen to a word Gavin says about me Langley --- he’s positively daft.”
“He says nothing but good things,” I lied, for Gavin was tactless about women, especially the ones he habitually slept with.
“Oh, Gavin’s an expert in everything, don’t you know, how to best use resources, how to make a lasting peace, how to best plant tulips.”
“Well, I was always keen on gardening,” Gavin said, puffing on his cigarette demurely.
“Oh, yes, that’s true. That’s something you can believe about Gavin. He actually is the landed Gentry --- his grandfather abandoned the family title, but kept the lands of course.”
“Yes, he had decidedly Liberal leanings.” Gavin sipped his cocktail and removed a fleck of tobacco from his lip with his fleshy pinkie-tip.
“We should all go to your family’s estate for a holiday. Wouldn’t it be grand Gavin?”
“Yes, of course, what a splendid idea. We are positively overworked. A little holiday is in order. Not too long, of course, there is a war on.”
“Its settled then. We go!” Lesley’s close green eyes beamed with frenzied glee.
Somewhere near the river a siren blared. Anti-aircraft guns popped in regular cadence. Gavin stood up and brushed the blackout shade aside.
“Dear,” he said, “looks like we’re in for it.”
“Should we go down to the shelter?” Lesley asked.
“Yes, lets --” Gavin extinguishing his cigarette, “-- only I invited someone from work over for a drink as well. I do hope she makes it safe.”
We climbed down the dark stairwell past the entryway and into the basement. The tenants were filtering down as well, carrying pillows, blankets, a radio, blankets, food. The shelter was just a placebo to prevent a general panic. Situationally we were doomed if the building took a direct hit.
Mass bombing were designed to demoralize as much as to do physical damage, but in one of those twists of our century the ironic counterpart had been achieved: the English refused to submit. A nation of invaders, now threatened with invasion, turned a steely gray face across that choppy channel, pushed a robust hand upward across the Cliffs of Dover and said --- no further.
I pulled my massive legs up and sat on a small bench. When a woman came in with a small baby wrapped in a gray shawl, and I gave her my spot.
The two dozen people in the basement were quiet, even studious, listening attentively to the giant, muffled footfalls in the distance. They danced from location to location, for a spell, but then they seemed to be falling in a tight clump on the other side of town.
I walked up to Gavin. He was standing against the rough wall with his elbow leaning on a broken piano smoking. From the blue-green vein protruding on his forehead I knew he was troubled.
“You invited Clare over, didn’t you,” I asked in a hush.
“Yes, I’m afraid I did. I knew that you like her so I wanted you two to mix. I hope she found somewhere to hole up.” He lit another cigarette. I could see the soft down on his forearm as he brought the match down and extinguished it.
Gavin was a stoic of a decidedly effeminate variety. He hid his emotions beneath a soft shell; you could see them churning and dynamic under the transparent surface. I stood over him, gazing at that spectacle, my looming bulk eclipsing him for a moment. He gave me a weak smile. For one can either hide emotion and know they are a sub-cutaneous present, or live them, and not know their origins.
I suppose I fit into the former. If you somehow measured the volume of my inner torments, your gauge would most likely break. But you would never know it from looking at my face (it is as placid and self-composed as a child’s duck pond). Budge showed his heart on his sleeve, but Budge was in control. He had captured his fleeting emotions of dread and fear like zoological specimens and his taxonomy was nearly complete. My menagerie had gaping holes.
A sudden burst. Budge fell forward. I propped him up by thrusting my hands beneath his armpits. He was surprisingly light and easy to manipulate. In his efforts to right himself his lit cigarette fell into my open breast pocket. It smoldered for some time until we both realized what it was and tamped it out.
“Sorry, sorry, Chum,” Gavin sputtered. The people were whimpering now. The hit was close. We could hear the wail of a fire truck. It must have hit somewhere down the street.
The door to the shelter burst open. Everyone turned for a moment thinking it was the Civil Patrol telling them to decamp, but it was Clare. She was in her old worn work uniform covered by a ratty tan raincoat. A scarf was wrapped around her head. It was covered with dust from plaster. Gavin and I rushed her.
“Oh Clare, we were awfully worried. Are you alright?” Gavin asked.
“Barely,” she said, removing her coat and head wrap, “its terrible out there. I thought I saw a plane fall from the sky. I just missed being hit. Several flats that went down east of Knightsbridge. Ahh!”
She sat down on a crate. I handed her a glass of water from the basement tap. She gulped it greedily and then stared at me. There was a terrible twinkle in her beautiful, cloudy gray eyes. I handed her a cigarette, and lighting the match, I felt paternalistic and sexual in a blind instant.
I followed the tapered lines of her waist, watching it flow down her slim hips to the protruding, knobby kneecaps of her outstretched legs. Her stockings had abominable runs in them, and her small feet, stuffed into shoes a size too big, were turned into each other like two small animals seeking mutual protection. I sat down next to her.
“I’m glad you’re safe.”
“What do Americans know of this? Your country has never been bombed or invaded.”
“Not true, you burned the White House in 1814.” I’ve stood at Fort McHenry in Baltimore Harbor years before on many occasions, where Francis Scott Key penned the Star Spangled Banner on the back of an envelope.
“That’s an abysmal lie.”
I raised my shoulders in weary gesture. I looked down at her, wishing I could kiss her petulant lips.
When the all clear siren rung we climbed upstairs. Gavin, Lesley, Clare and I stood on the street in a fine misting rain.
“Well, I don’t know about you,” Gavin said, “but inside is ruined for me. Let’s go over to the pub for some drinks. I want to get tight.” Everyone agreed.
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.
FOUR
My heavy boots clomped over rickety duckboards that had been constructed hastily along the Thames. The tubes were so clogged with people escaping death from the sky that the trains were no longer running regularly. I followed Clare, squinting behind her in the flat winter light. She looked indistinct in the gray light of the river, which reflected the water not in normal ripples that composed and decomposed with the movement of the water, but a bland steady stream of drab olive gray green, creating a queasy paisley pattern along the uneven strand. Every now and again Clare turned to make sure I was still following.
QMS was housed in an ugly, squat building of discolored yellowing granite. One hundred and fifty years of Thames-side abutment gave it the appearance of a dock standing on end. It had hideous brown discolorations and black scouring running down its sides like a mottled, partially shed skin.
When we entered the sallow green halls there was the mild stench of sewage and an ubiquitous hissing like a kettle on a hob. Clare led me down the hall. It was lined with offices, each office honeycombed with cubbies and the cubbies were further sub-divided by small desks. There was the metallic click and clank of office machines and a spatter of telephone bells ringing. I could see the odd assortment of English faces behind desks and standing with cups and saucers, of aquiline noses on uncommonly broad faces, flaxen hair pasted down over thinning pates, complexions mottled with sunspots, liver spots, uneven tans, blemishes and sundry discolorations; women with bulging bosoms the shapes of conical torpedoes, quite attractive to look at, but thrown out of proportion by wide hips and stout legs, or rendered unappealing by missing teeth or shoddy dental work in highly visible areas of the mouth.
Clare brought me to the end of the hall to a door stenciled “MAJ. GAVIN BUDGE,” opened the door, introduced us perfunctorily, and before I could even focus on the pale figure behind the desk she had disappeared from the blind slice along the edge of my peripheral vision. Major Budge stood up to take my hand. I had saluted, but he did not return it, so I slipped my ebony paw into his moony hand.
“Ahh… Vandemark, Langley Vandemark.” He seemed dreadfully relieved that it was me. “Please call me Gavin. Gavin Budge. We don’t rest on formality here, you know. Not really the Regular Army, rest assured. Ah, no, just do your work, I say, and leave the military manners to those who have a career to foster.”
Gazing at him, I realized we were an odd juxtaposition of opposite types. Budge was wispy, thin, and young, perhaps twenty-five. He seemed incapable of growing real hair, but instead had a curious soft blond down on his head, neck and forearms. His moustache, slightly darker than his body down, covered a thin upper lip at an irregular, slightly off center angle, a sort of downward slope on the left side, and an upper slope at the right, giving him an amused, ironic expression without a trace of malice.
He extended a soft hand and gestured for me to sit. Now that I was on his level I could see that his extraordinary thinness bordered on emaciation. I thought I saw, in the pale dull glimmer of his eyes, a reflection of my state-side brother.
“The way I see it Vandemark,” he continued, “is that you’re being stationed here is a real god-send, so to speak. Even if precious little is accomplished, its just good for morale to see the US uniform milling about in the halls. We must try and get you out and about as well. Clare, she’s a darling plum, isn’t she, will bring you about, meet the right people, and all that.”
I must have frowned.
“Oh, don’t worry Vandemark, you’re not here as a token just to gussy up the place. No, we have real goals for you to accomplish. Well then, unless you have any questions Clare will show you to your office. I’ll apologize in advance for your accommodations, we are a little short on space. Actually, not a little. Space is somewhat of a crisis around here.”
Clare escorted me down the hallway. The same heads peered from behind cubicles, the same legs jutted out beneath desks, the rattle of a typewriter, the buzz of a bell.
People huddled around a radio listening to news about some disastrous campaign in the Pacific. We turned and headed down steps to a vaulted hallway lined with transverse hallways; this hall branched off at a fork; we took the left fork. Signs showed one’s supposed position: a confusing array of initials and arrows pointing to various destinations ISU , AWL , IFG-20. I asked Clare what each department was and she answered in vague terms. One department ordered a certain type of tropical uniform, pith helmets, canteens, mosquito netting, another kept His Majesty’s Navy supplied with gray paint, another binoculars. Soon we were in a darker corridor lit by dim yellow bulbs suspended by twisted and fraying wires.
“We’re technically underground now”, Clare informed me, “Some of these warrens even go under the river.”
Moisture seeped through the concrete ceiling. A mold haze hung suspended over the hall in a thin vaporous wisps. Fewer people moved about down here. There seemed to be only me, Clare, and an ever narrowing corridor.
Finally she opened a door with my name crookedly stenciled on the front. It was a small room with a squat desk in its center. A tall green chair stood behind it, and on the desk was a matching green blotter. A small black phone sat left of center. When we entered I realized that the room was not small, just cluttered with stacked boxes and crates. They were piled higher than me, butting against the dripping ceiling, cascading down behind the door, blocking a mysterious iron door on the other side of the room opposite the desk. A few were open. I saw military style boots, socks, gloves, hats. They looked like Great War vintage gear.
“You think its bad in here, take a look in there.” Clare ineffectually pushed away some boxes in front of the iron door. She was a wisp of a girl, so I helped her budge the door open with my foot.
She reached around with her long arm and felt for the light switch. The vast room was brimming with crates. Another room and one behind it held an equal number of crates and boxes. I could not see an end.
“What the hell is this stuff?” I asked incredulously.
“Most of it is overflow from the Great War, the last war. Stuff never used, thank God. But there’s some strange things in here as well. This building once housed a telephone and telegraph company, a cotton importer, an indigo importer, some kind of government bureau in the ‘20’s. They were trying to recycle and reuse this stuff, I think, but it never panned out.”
She turned and looked at me like a weary bored little girl. Her blue uniform was a pasty gray in the underground light. But her elfin skin and gray eyes glistened with moisture, as if all her life force was housed in her irisis’.
I wondered, in one of those fantastic moments of erotic illumination, when you suddenly realize that another is a desirable object, when a shift in cognition renders a woman a beloved, what this gray green creature would look like curled up next to my tremendous bulk. Would she lay beneath me, outstretched and yielding to my greater weight, or be slung on top of me, poised above a buffer of moist air cushioning us, her pointed ears and glistening eyes turned outward to the dark, toward the endless configurations of murky shapes and outlines that were my meticulous creations?
I thought I saw, in here childlike irritated glare, a hint of the same nastily arranged conspiracy that haunted me to my bones ---- the ability, without a trace of contrition or denial --- to hide one’s moribund impulses from the world; to take the duplicitous face that we (I) created in our (my) breasts and unapologetic, thrust it outward.
When Clare left me alone in my new office I stood silently for a moment, arms akimbo, breathing irregularly and shallowly, a great weight, irregular and queer in its distribution, was sitting atop my head, pressing down. I held my massive head aslant and saw, through my dimming field of vision, the bug eyed dull gaze of a black rubber gas mask.
I thought it was an elf.
3
Do not listen to anybody who says the contrary, the world was once an achingly simpler place. I recall, with the clarity of a vision, when every action I took seemed to be invested with honey rich meaning.
Today, when every human step seems decidedly ad-hoc, it is a leap of imagination to fancy a world drenched in signification. But it was so. I know I existed in a web of meaning. I understood my little corner of Fifth Avenue and 123rd Street as if nature’s god had bequeath to me, instead of eyes, some piece of scientific equipment which placed the world in hyper focus.
I could view the cracks in bricks of the sidewalk as if they were canyons. I could see the individual granules of city dust peppered on maple leaves. And if things grew dim over time it was less my doing, and more the swirl of the outside world, with its creeping gray tones and its looming smothering sands, invading a space that was once a private, settled, and cozy nook where meaning was not exhaustively searched for, but simply grasped and pocketed like a prized marble.
If you believe that all of this is not possible perhaps it is because it is like all difficult conceptual problems, the real devil is not in the details but in the arrangement of the details. The real problem is not how Chance throws down our cards, but how we take them and arrange them to suit our designs. For what good is a world if it is not fit for us to live in? Why would anyone live among a heap of broken objects? Transformation rules the day.
I clearly recall, with a gauzy haze similar to the ring of smoke used at the margins of cinema cameras when depicting the nostalgic past, being taken by my Uncle to the piers on the East River several blocks from our house. Uncle Albert Vandemark, one of the Hudson River Valley Vandemarks, looked upon our city habits with disdain. He felt, and it may very well be true, that city life led to degeneracy and effeminacy in men. He believed it was his duty to stave the flow of passivity that was rendering the Vandemark limbs useless, dull, atrophied.
So Uncle and Nephew would proudly tramp down to the docks, towels in hand, to where the East River forms a small nick in the island of Manhattan, and where, according to local legend, a shanty of freed Slaves once had settled north of muddy Old New Amsterdam.
Once there, Uncle Albert would disrobe to his bright bumble bee yellow and black swimming trunks. They fit his massive bulk snugly; his rounded loins protruded from his crotch. The bumblebee black rings that circled his arms and waist gave him the appearance of a man that was about to burst from his seams. I slinked out of my youthful shorts and shirt and stood passively watching my gargantuan Uncle.
All around us various urchins who worked the streets as petty vendors, newsboys, and hawkers of rags, were plunging into the river, cannon balling and diving into the placid, warm green waters. Uncle and I would swim beyond the confusion and I would receive the rudimentary instructions in long-term survival swimming. He taught me how to inflate my clothes by tying the ends of shirt and pant legs into knots, creating buoyant floatation devices that looked like puffed, bloated corpses; how to alternate swimming strokes to prevent fatigue; how to discern, from wind and cloud patterns, the direction of land.
All the while Uncle Albert’s voice would boom instructions, correcting mistakes, making reproofs, admonishments, all above the din of ships in the not so distant channel, and the splashing and screams of innumerable little boys that had never heard the word adolescence, let alone lived it. We would swim back, my paternalistic Uncle doing the backstroke, his yellow face puffing and spewing water --- what did he know about our family? What did he think would become of me?
We strolled back from the docks in the summer Harlem twilight. Somewhere in New York Harbor a German U-Boat periscope was peeking above the calm August water and focusing, even so briefly, on our retreating figures, before concentrating on American shipping efforts during the mid-days of the Great War.
An Italian with a busy haywire mustache was hawking ice cream from a pushcart near our corner. I could smell the soft aroma of polluted water on my quickly drying tight skin and hear overhead the clatter of pans and pots shifting about in kitchens in the rows of abutting brownstones.
We stopped at our brownstone. Uncle Albert sat on the stoop and watched some of the colored people that were moving into the neighborhood strolling down the street. They were well-dressed men and women, boys and girls, in summer suits and bright floral dresses, outside to enjoy the evening breeze. Albert looked on with evident scorn. Behind us a shade rustled. My uncle looked at the movement out of the corner of his eye and again twisted his face in scorn, but this time with a touch of anguish.
My brother Homer was looking out the window of his room. Homer’s eyes were growing sensitive by this time, so he spent most of his days indoors, only furtively glancing out the window. We were so close in age and appearance that many people mistook us for twins. Except while I grew robust and broad, Homer stayed narrow and slim. He was such a perfect inversion of my character that we dovetailed at key junctures ---- we both pursued our own ends with such a singular purpose and catastrophic intensity that in the end we were destined to meet alone, on a silent plain, where the distended parts of our psyches fit into snug ball and socket joints.
But first there were days of blissful differentiation, of Uncle Albert and me, of Mother and Father, or me bobbing up and down in a slick green ribbon of water, and of Homer. The dissolution of the Union, for better or worse, came much later.
