Best Man Page 5
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09
Father
For a very long time, I had no memories of my father. Actually, that statement is inexact, for I still have no memories of him. I know he exists, or that he once existed, only because it is a basic requirement of human biology. What I am attempting to say, is that until I was about five or so, in my earliest years of elementary school, I had no awareness that I had reached this world through any mechanism other than my mother alone.
At some point — I’m not entirely sure when, although certainly I was still a young boy — I recall asking my mother about him. I knew by then that I had a father. All the other children I knew had two parents, even if there had been a divorce or even an accident that might have taken one of them away. And there had been wars, as well. World War II and then Korea. Many of my classmates had fathers who had been overseas in those wars.
I asked my mother about this. Most likely, I didn’t address the issue directly, because I had learned by then that the topic was not one she had shown much willingness to address. I suspect I offered the thesis I wanted her to confirm, positing that he had been in the Army during the Second World War or maybe Korea. I probably suggested that he had been a war hero, fighting to liberate the oppressed people in Europe. That he had later died a hero so that the world could be free. Perhaps this idea evolved from something we learned in school. It was before Vietnam, and military service remained a source of great pride and honor.
It is my belief now that I may have confused my hopes for the story of my father with the truth — or, more likely, the absence of any facts whatsoever. As I think back, I have no recollection of my mother actually confirming the notion that my father died a hero. Instead, I think she merely deflected the suggestion, allowing me to harbor it as an explanation that would not be discussed again.
At the current stage of my life, I can recognize the story of my father, as I believed it then, as something other than an accurate history. In accord with the taxonomy I described earlier, it should be categorized as a secret lie. It was but an early entry in my lifelong list of such things.
I think I made several other forays into the story of my father, but potential sources of information were few. My mother remained unwilling to discuss the subject, and for some reason, I was much too intimidated to ever ask Uncle Christopher about it.
I did make several unsuccessful efforts to find something in old newspaper stories. The first attempt took shape on a rainy day that I spent at the library. A new microfilm reader had been installed, and I attempted to learn something about a war hero by looking at old headlines. Needless to say, I was overwhelmed by the magnitude of my proposed undertaking and conceded defeat by the end of that day.
A second foray began at a later time, after I learned in biology class about gestation periods in mammals. I thought I was brilliant, when I deduced that I only needed to search no further back than nine months prior to my birth. My strategy also extended beyond front-page articles about war casualties, and I also looked at the obituary sections. It seemed at the time that my search took months, but thinking back, I would guess that I only devoted several days to the effort before finding myself thwarted by the lack of results.
It was probably about then that I realized I must let it be. My father was who he was, and I could not change his history. And regardless of what I might find — or not find — my own path through life had already been set and would remain unaffected by his. Moreover, I realized it would be too intrusive, and somehow too painful for my mother, if I continued to pursue it.
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10
Martha’s Vineyard
I think it was when I was about five or six that I first learned about spying. In the summertime, my mother and I would go to the big house at the shore for several weeks. There were many names for where it was. The Cape, Cape Cod, the Vineyard, Martha’s Vineyard. The different names confused me the first few times we visited, because it was always the same house in the same place.
In the beginning, I didn’t know whose house it actually was, only that others would be there besides my mother and me. There were cousins and some aunts and uncles. Different people at different times. Usually Uncle Christopher was there, but not always, and my mother explained that the house was his. It was often called the Daniel Webster House, or just the Webster House.
People also called it the summer cottage. Now keep in mind that I was very young when I first heard this term, but there was nevertheless a clear contradiction between my understanding of the word and what I saw when I visited. My vocabulary was limited, but I knew the word from stories my mother had read to me. They were fairy tales and the like, but a cottage was very clearly a structure that was, by definition, small. An old lady might live in a cottage in the woods, possibly with a child, just like my mother and I lived in a small house. A cottage would be smaller than our house, perhaps with only a single room, and certainly not having an upstairs.
Consider, then, my astonishment on the very first occasion that we arrived at the summer cottage. It wasn’t just large, it was gigantic. Larger than any house I’d ever seen. I found out that it had three floors, with bedrooms on the top two. Altogether, there were seventeen bedrooms. Even now, it sounds more like a castle than a house, and certainly not like my mental image of a tiny thatched-roof structure in a fairy tale that was home to a boy and his mother.
The main floor had a sun porch, a kitchen, a dining room, a living room, and a foyer. Each of these rooms was huge. And if all that wasn’t enough, there were living quarters below the main floor for the people who worked there. I never was in those rooms, but I discovered that if I walked around to the back of the building, there was another entrance at the lower level and many windows that looked out onto the back lawn.
Because the different families had different vacation schedules, there were always new visitors at the house. They all had ties to Uncle Christopher, although some would describe him as a family friend while others just called him family. Not everyone came with children, but many did, so there would always be someone to play with. Not always my same age, but close enough for a week or so.
There was much to do at when we visited Martha’s Vineyard. The house sat atop a large hill, and the sea was visible in three directions. At the base of the hill was a large bay that they called the pond, largely closed off from the ocean, and that is where Uncle Christopher kept his boats. Large boats and small boats, sailing craft and motorboats. As soon as any of us had learned to swim, we were required to demonstrate that ability to Uncle Christopher. Then we would be permitted to start learning how to sail. Initially we would go with a grownup, and our job would be to do things with the ropes. Of course, they weren’t called ropes but lines, and there were many other new words we were required to learn. Bow, helm, keel, heel. And starboard and port and luffing and tacking.
When a child would master the basic vocabulary and the corresponding skills of maneuvering a boat in the wind, he or she would graduate to the next level of sailing alone on one of the small boats. It was always under close adult supervision, but it was independence of a kind I had never before experienced.
When I learned to sail, it was probably about ten years after Hemingway wrote his last great work, The Old Man and the Sea, a story that included a young boy as one of the characters. When I learned to sail alone on the pond, which was less than a mile across, I would be in safe, calm water. That never prevented me from hunching over the tiller, an oar near my feet to serve as an imaginary spear, and my watchful eyes searching the roiled waters for the sharks that would keep coming for me. The adventure always ended as I steered back to the dock, receiving polite applause if I managed to slide in without hitting the wooden structure.
Sundays were special. Uncle Christopher was invariably present, and after a breakfast feast, nearly everyone would head down to the pond. The fun would begin with a swimming competition, which seemed to be part of his belief that physical activi
ty and athletics were as important as classroom study for our education. There was no prize for simply getting in the water, nor even for completing the swim to the red buoy and back. At the same time, there would always be multiple winners, and Uncle Christopher gave a coin or a piece of special candy to those he said had finished first in their age class. We all loved it.
When the swimming competition was over, everyone would migrate to the boats. I remain uncertain how the assignments were made, but some grownups would have a small sailboat that might be large enough for a family of three. Others would go out in one of the boats that had an outboard motor. And a few would stand by to monitor those children who were in the learning stages of sailing a one-man craft.
A small group, probably a half-dozen grownups and children altogether, would join Uncle Christopher on his sailboat. This was not some rowboat with a pole for a mast. In my memory, it was very big, and I would estimate now that it probably was at least thirty feet long. When everyone was on board and properly outfitted with their life vests, we would slowly proceed to the mouth of the bay under power of the boat’s inboard motor. Then, magically, we would be in the open ocean.
No longer were we able to feel small ripples as the boat moved along. We would cut through waves that might be anywhere from two to four feet in height, and as the bow of our craft cut up and over each of these, it would just as quickly come crashing down into the trough between the waves, throwing a spray of salt water across everyone on board. We would all yell out, and it was an exhilarating experience. Had Uncle Christopher not been such a good sailor, it would also have been frightening.
When we returned through the inlet at the end of our sail, and motored slowly up to the dock, everyone on board as well as those waiting for us on shore rewarded our skipper with ringing cheers, not the polite recognition that we children would receive. For this was a bona fide sailing craft with a true skipper, and we had just come back from an authentic adventure.
• • • • •
It was on one of my early visits to Martha’s Vineyard that another boy, about my own age, told me about the secret passages. He even pointed to a metal grate and said it was where one of them started. When I asked if he would show me the inside, he became frightened, and the conversation ended. We went outdoors to play.
Of course, I had heard about secret passages. I knew they existed. They were described in books I had read, or that my mother had read to me, since I was not very old at the time. Yet I had never seen one in real life, and I wondered if this other boy had been telling the truth, or if his imagination had simply been fueled by the same stories I had heard. I was, for some reason, aware that this was not a topic for general conversation. Consequently, I did not ask about it, and I placed it in that part of my memory where I already had begun to store my secrets.
This is not to suggest that I simply forgot about it. Quite the opposite. It provided the opportunity for many vivid fantasies over the next year, or possibly two. I created a castle in my mind that was somehow based on the Webster House, and it had secret passages through which knights and Saracens could sneak about to attack their enemies, or perhaps escape them. In my case, the needs were not so urgent, nor were the purposes so mysterious. But they were secret, and that was sufficient.
As I came to understand later, what I was calling “passages” were no more than part of the attic structure, or something related to it, in old houses of that style. It was much like the crawl space behind the wall of my room at home. But this crawl space extended the entire length of the third floor of the Webster House. On my next summertime visit, sleeping in a different third-floor room, I discovered the common thread.
On the exterior of the top floor of a building, as the roof sloped down, the ceiling of the room beneath got lower and lower. Rather than allowing part of the room to become unusable, the builder would erect a knee wall, which is what the grownups called it. Behind the knee wall was a space that could be used for storage, or it might not be used at all. Or it might be used for the purpose I chose. For spying.
I never saw any of the adults crawl into the space behind the knee wall. They were all too big. But it wasn’t too small for a nine-year old child. Or even a twelve-year-old. I probably began my spying adventures at that younger age. I would have been old enough by then to navigate the space quietly and stealthily.
Many of my recollections of those clandestine undertakings remain vague. I think it is less from repression of frightening memories than of their lack of significance. What could be more boring than peering through a metal grate at an empty room? Or a darkened room with someone snoring in a bed? On the other hand, I do recall the exhilaration of accomplishing the act itself. Especially that very first time I traversed the entire length of the house, from the large bedroom at one end to the matching room at the other end. I reigned supreme in my secret world.
There are some vivid memories, however. One time there was an older girl. Not a girl at all, at least I didn’t think so then, because she seemed much older than I, and she had breasts. She was changing her clothes, and she was in her underwear. I watched intently, and I was totally riveted. At the time, I wasn’t sure why it was exciting. Even now, I can’t be sure if it was a sign that I was growing up, or if it was merely the thrill of observing without being seen.
I had gone the length of the crawl space from my room at the end of the house closest to the bay. Quietly. I wasn’t quite certain if what I was doing was wrong, and even now, I’m not sure that I would classify it with that word. But right or wrong, I knew that I didn’t want to be discovered. It was part of the game. And only by playing the game in this way, would I gain the rewards.
On another occasion, probably when I was a year or so older, I watched through the louvers of the heating register when there were grownups in the room. A man and a woman. They were young by adult standards, but at the time they seemed to me just to be grownups. I had no other concept of age.
I watched this couple as they removed their clothes. I saw them touch each other and hold each other. They seemed be very intensely involved in that activity. I remember how they both got on the bed. They were not lying but moving around a lot. They made noises, and their motions intensified. At one point it sounded like he had hurt her.
I wondered if I should go and get my mother, so she could rescue the woman, but I realized I could never do that. I could never surrender my secret place. It was much too late for that.
Soon enough, the man made a noise as well. Not a cry of pain, more of a groan. Then he rolled over on his back, and I could see both of them lying there, both on their backs, both naked. They were smiling. I remember what he said to her. “We’d better get back downstairs quickly before your husband starts asking questions.”
It was then that I realized I was not the only one with secrets. It was then that I realized the power of my secrets. What I didn’t want them to know was also something that they did not want anyone else to know. I realized that I had a great power over them. I didn’t want to use it, but I knew that my secret knowledge would give me protection should I need it.
• • • • •
Without question, my most important memory from those exploits, and perhaps one of the most formative experiences of my boyhood, took place when I was twelve. It also involved a young woman, although it might be more accurate to describe her as an older girl. Looking back on it now, trying to recreate the mental images, she seemed much older than I, definitely not a child, but not quite a grownup. I saw her take off her clothes.
I remember seeing her at the house the day before, although I did not talk to her. Her name was Cynthia. She was very pretty, with thin hips. I had seen her in a two-piece bathing suit the day before, and she was stunning.
When I overheard her say that after lunch, she was going to change and then take out one of the sailboats, I went to my room and made my way through the crawl space to the other end of the house. I knew the room she was staying in, and I re
ached my secret viewing place well ahead of her arrival. I waited anxiously, forcing myself to remain quiet, barely maintaining my composure.
Her swimsuit was on the window sill, where it had been drying in the sun, and she placed it on the end of the bed. She was standing in the sunlight when she removed her blouse and then her bra, and I could see her breasts clearly. I thought she was beautiful. She stood before the mirror, looking at herself.
I found myself holding on to one of the wooden beams in the crawl space, trying to avoid falling over. It was a very strange feeling for me, and I didn’t understand it. I know I was breathing faster, and I was trying very hard not to be heard. I was afraid that she would notice the grating on the wall and discover my secret hiding place. All would be lost.
I tried holding my breath, but that made it worse. I couldn’t move, for the noise would certainly give me away. Eventually, I found that I could breathe in and out slowly and quietly. She didn’t hear me, and she didn’t see me. It was an exquisite experience.
I think it was the next summer, or maybe the following one, when a sequel took place. Cynthia was again staying in that same room, and I was finding more and more frequent excuses to disappear from the activities of the others in the house. More and more time to conceal myself in the crawl space. Even if it were only for a few seconds, I knew that at the very least I could watch when she changed into her nightgown before going to bed in the evening. It seems by my memory that this went on for weeks, but it was probably only three or four times. It was the summer that I perfected my spying.
I say perfected, because I learned how to combine observation with action. It was watching Cynthia, watching and remaining perfectly quiet, that I learned how to move without making noise. Thinking back on it now, I am amazed that I was never caught. But perhaps that is how I became so good at it.