Nested Scrolls Read online

  Glowing Fog

  My earliest childhood memories are like stained glass windows in a dark cathedral—hypnotic and mysterious. I’ve given up wondering why this or that scene happens to be preserved. I’m just happy for what I find, my few bright vision fragments, souvenirs of an era when time was a sea, a song, a signal—anything but a delimited line.

  My first memory is from 1948, when I was two. I was fingerpainting the white expanse of my bed’s footboard with the contents of my diaper. I didn’t yet know it smelled bad. My fingers left smooth trails in the spreading pattern I was creating. I was proud of my discovery. I remember the morning sun slanting in, my mother appearing behind me, her cry of dismay.

  A perfect start for a writer.

  We lived in the countryside near the town of Saint Matthews, east of Louisville, in a big old farmhouse that we rented from the Russells, who lived on a different farm. Sometimes we’d drive in a car to visit the Russells. They were the first old people that I’d ever seen. Old Mr. Russell showed me tricks with his fingers. First he made two of his fingers into a see-saw, and then he took out his pocket knife and cut off the tip of his thumb. He slid the cut-off thumb-tip up and down his forefinger, making a squeaking noise with his mouth. I didn’t like him.

  When I was still two, my father had a house built for us across a field from the big farmhouse we were renting. Pop took take us to see our house frame going up, and the men nailing on plywood walls. One day we moved in. Mom pushed me in a stroller and my big brother, Embry, pulled a wagon full of his books and toys. The new house smelled like paint. Pop carried me through all the rooms on his shoulders, ducking to get through the doors.

  That summer, rye grew in the field between the old farm and our new house. The stalks were taller than me. I walked through the rye, tramping down labyrinths, a little worried that I’d be scolded. But no one cared. In the fall the rye was harvested by a giant machine.

  We had cats, a collie that kept running away, and a Springer spaniel named Nina. Nina birthed a litter of puppies in the garage. My parents said we could keep one. I wasn’t sure if my family could hear me talk or if they could understand what I said, but I suggested that we name the puppy Muffin. Toasted English muffins with butter and honey were my favorite food. My brother and my parents laughed and agreed that Muffin was a good name. It was the first time I’d been party to a family decision. I felt shy and proud.

  My father built a doghouse in the back yard, covering it in black tarpaper with shiny, multicolored speckles of sand. I liked sitting by the doghouse with Nina, Muffin and the other puppies—who stuck around for quite some time. Sometimes my brother would climb onto the doghouse roof to pick cherries from the tree behind it.

  We had a wading pool in the back yard, and on Saturdays, Pop would lie in it drinking a long-necked brown bottle of beer, his knees bent so that his feet could fit into the pool too. I’d splash around in the edges, happily singing London Bridge, and Pop would lift his legs or bend forward to let me pass. It was good to touch his bare skin. He smelled like freckles.

  After we moved, the Russells started selling off the fields around the farmhouse that we’d rented. They auctioned off the farm machinery one day in 1949, when I was three.

  Our family went to the auction. I was sitting high up on a piece of machinery. It was yellow. I could see the tops of the grownups’ heads. One of them smiled up at me, calling me by name.

  “Rudy.”

  I was surprised the man knew this name. He laughed with my father. Pop’s arms reached the huge distance up to where I perched on the tractor’s metal seat, and he lifted me down.

  A new family rented the nearby farmhouse where I’d been born. They had a boy a little younger than me. Willy.

  I liked Willy. He had a citified accent, a reckless laugh, and a wild way of talking about a monster called Frankenstein, who supposedly followed Willy no matter how far he walked or ran. Willy talked about Frankenstein as if he were a real creature whom he saw all the time.

  My mother had a wind-up mantelpiece clock that she’d gotten from her mother in Germany. In the house I could always hear it ticking, and every so often it would chime. Willy admired Mom’s clock, and one day he snuck it home to his house under his shirt. His mother made him bring the clock back to us.

  Occasionally Mom would leave me alone in our house while she worked in the garden. Besides the mantel clock and the refrigerator, I could hear a high singing in my ears. I imagined it was the sound of the Earth turning.

  Sometimes I’d be sick, and I’d stay in bed all day. The doctor would arrive with a black bag and maybe a shot of penicillin. When Pop got home from work he’d come in and look at me.

  “How’s my sausage? Look out for the bumble-bee!”

  He’d make a buzzing noise and slowly move his hand in a circle, eventually landing it on my face.

  After that he’d put a nickel on the tip of his left forefinger, then snap the fingers of his right hand. The nickel would disappear up his right sleeve. He’d pretend to find it in my ear and let me keep it.

  One early summer, perhaps in 1950, I learned to swat flies. I went out on our concrete back steps and swatted flies for a whole hour. More and more of them came, attracted by the bodies of their squashed comrades. I called my mother to admire the carnage. She didn’t like it.

  “Ugh. Don’t you ever do that again.”

  All summer we’d run around barefoot. Our long driveway was gravel, and over the months, our feet would get so tough that it didn’t hurt to walk on the gravel.

  Our house was on a street called Rudy Lane, which seemed reasonable and natural to me. Only later did I realize that it was a coincidence. All summer we’d run around barefoot. Our long driveway was gravel, and over the months, our feet would get so tough that it didn’t hurt to walk on the gravel. Initially we were completely surrounded by farms and fields, but then our first retail establishment appeared, a Standard Oil gas station at the corner of Rudy Lane and Route 42. My big brother Embry and I walked there.

  They sold candy from large glass jars that you could reach into: caramels, bubble-gum and Saf-T-Pop lollipops with a limp loop instead of a hard stick. My brother told me that the candy was free—I guess he wanted to see what I’d do. Sure enough I took several pieces. The man running the station asked me if I was going to pay for it, and we didn’t have any money, but he let us keep the candy. Embry took some of it. We’d hardly ever had candy before. It was great.

  Our whole family was friends with the Keith family, who lived about a mile from us on a large farm, complete with barn, cows, horses, chickens, and a spring-house. They were good people, mild-mannered and well-educated.

  Big Paul Keith was a judge, an avid fisherman who tied his own flies, and, for a time, the scoutmaster of our Boy Scout troop. He was an uncommonly good scoutmaster, calmly helping us enjoy the outdoors without any bossing or bullshit.

  His wife Sally casually maintained vast beds of flowers, a smokehouse where she cured hams, and cupboards of home-made jam. She had dozens of country quilts and several shelves of cute salt-and-pepper-shaker sets that I loved to play with. I remember a girl and boy pig, a moon and a sun, a bull and a bullfighter.

  The Keiths had three children: Sherry, Phoebe, and Little Paul. Sherry was loud and laughing, Phoebe wore her blondish hair in braids. They were practically the first girls I ever met. I thought they were fascinating, beautiful and sophisticated. But I was younger than them, and beneath their consideration.

  When our parents would have meals together, we kids would go off together. Once we climbed into a tree house populated by daddy longlegs spiders—little orange ovals walking on skinny black legs—and they completely freaked me out. Sherry, Phoebe and Embry laughed to hear me scream. Little Paul comforted me.

  Other times, we’d go down to the dank stone springhouse—and Sherry would tell us ghost stories, holding a dramatic flashlight under her chin. Her spookiest story was about the…little…white…hands, a tale that
she said had taken place in the very springhouse where we huddled.

  Supposedly an old man and woman had lived in Keiths’ farmhouse before them, and one day the woman had disappeared. That night, the old man heard a high, thin voice calling for him: “Help me! Help me!” He followed a ball of light to the springhouse. The light settled upon a shallow pool of water in the corner, the very spot where the spring issued. Crawling around the edges of the pool were dozens of…little…white…hands…

  And then Phoebe would shriek and Sherry would turn off the flashlight, and I’d roar in terror and blunder out into the firefly-filled night.

  Nursery school was held in a big room at our church, St. Francis in the Fields Episcopal. The room had grayish-black asphalt tiles on the floor, and ordinary sash windows in the walls. We played with big, hollow plywood blocks that were two or three feet long on each side. You could line them up to make paths, or stack them higher than your head. They made a nice boom when they fell down.

  When I started coming there, in 1949 when I was three, one of the children took me aside and pointed out one of the others. “That’s Butch. Stay away from him. He’s mean.” I stayed away from Butch, but I had plenty of other friends, nice little boys and girls.

  We’d play a game called Rhythms where we’d dance around the room with a record playing, and now and then the teacher would lift up the needle and you’d have to freeze in place where you’d been when the music stopped. If you didn’t freeze fast enough, you were Out.

  I could read a few letters by the time I was in kindergarten. Printed on the porcelain of the toilet was the word, CHURCH, which made sense to me—although really I suppose it was a trademark. One day I was sitting on this toilet and two little girls came into the bathroom.

  “Get out of here,” I told them from my stall, “Can’t you read? This bathroom says MEN.”

  “No it doesn’t,” they brattily insisted.

  We argued and argued. It was one of the first more-or-less logical arguments I’d ever had.

  In the winter, we wore leggings over our regular pants. I hated my leggings. They were hard to take off, hard to find among all the other leggings, and hard to put on.

  In first grade, in 1951, I had a teacher called Mrs. Devine. She was strict. If you talked when you weren’t supposed to, she’d make you stand on one leg in front of the class.

  Mrs. Devine grouped the students into three tables covered with oilcloth, one red, one blue, and one yellow. I sat at the red table, and we were the redbirds. The redbirds were smarter than the bluebirds and the yellow-birds.

  A boy named Lee was a yellowbird. He could hardly ever answer Mrs. Devine’s questions. It was embarrassing, I felt sorry for him. But outside in the trash at the edge of the playground we found a discarded car tire that had his name on it as a brand. Lee. That was something.

  In the playground I learned how to pump my legs and make my swing move by myself. It took me quite a few days to figure this out. But then I could swing really high. I often wondered if it might be possible to swing so hard that you wrapped the chain all the way around the top support.

  Sometimes, instead of my mother driving me to school, I’d wait by the side of Route 42 near Rudy Lane for Barbara Tucker to pick me up and give me a ride to first grade—which, like kindergarten, was being held at our church. Miss Tucker worked at our church. She drove a nice car, a black and white 1951 Buick Roadmaster with four little portholes set into the side of the hood. At some point I stuck my fingers into the holes and determined that they were fake, in the sense that they didn’t go all the way through.

  Miss Tucker wore more lipstick than any woman I’d ever seen. It got all over the cigarettes she smoked. She was tidy and well-dressed and not overweight, but somehow a little odd looking. She lived with her mother.

  She was nice and I liked her, as I found her easy to talk to. I could tell that she thought I was bright, and that made me feel good.

  School was only in the mornings. I’d come home at lunchtime, and it would be just me and Mom.

  I’d bring home papers from school. Sheets of one-digit sums, little dictations, and a few drawings. My writing was sprawling and uncontrolled.

  For lunch, Mom would eat square pumpernickel bread and blue cheese, while I had Campbell’s chicken noodle soup and perhaps a bologna sandwich. Sometimes Mom would treat me to a special meal of spaghetti and lambchop. I was fussy about food, and she worried about me eating enough.

  My mother was opinionated, outspoken within the family, and quick to label things “amazing” or “disgusting”—two of her favorite words. But she was always patient and loving with me, always approving—unless I did something like smearing poop on the bedstead or swatting hundreds of flies. One of Mom’s most characteristic gestures towards me was to smile and then nod encouragingly.

  After lunch I’d sit on her lap and she’d hug and kiss me. “Yes,” Mom would say. “Good Rudy.”

  Muffin would whine, looking dog-mournful. “Look at Muffy,” I’d say. “Muffy feels left out.” Then I’d pat Muffin and take my nap.

  Sometimes I wouldn’t actually sleep, I’d just lie on my bed for awhile. My mother would lie down in her room, reading or napping. Once I wanted to get up early to play, and I went to ask her if it was okay. She seemed to be asleep, so I knelt down next to her bed and prayed that she’d let me go outside. Suddenly noticing me there, she sat up, surprised.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Praying that you’ll let me go outside.”

  “Of course you can go outside. You don’t have to pray for a thing like that.”

  My mother got me into a driving group with some of the other kids at the St. Francis School. The school went up to the third grade. I liked one of the girls that I rode with: Polly. She had a nice voice, and a calm, casual way of talking. She was almost like a boy.

  In the winter of 1952, when we were on the playground, I was mad because Polly had pushed onto the seesaw ahead of me. As she rose up past me, I grabbed her leg and bit it. For the rest of the day I was waiting to be punished. Very slowly I realized that, as Polly was wearing leggings, she hadn’t felt the bite. And nobody else had noticed.

  I got to go play at Polly’s house a few times. She had a game called Cootie that I liked. You’d roll dice to get plastic pieces that you assembled into a brightly colored model of an alien insect—and you won if you were the first person to finish making a complete cootie.

  Another girl I hung around with was Barbie, who lived on a big farm with horses. My parents knew her parents from church. They had a patch of gooseberries, which I’d never seen before—fat, striped berries filled with slimy, sour seeds.

  Barbie got me to play a game where we were separated lovers who’d been looking for each other for years and we walked right by each other in a snow storm, missing each other by only a foot, but not seeing each other in the fog of ice-crystals. This enactment was taking place in a pasture on a sunny September afternoon on her farm.

  Another time, Barbie got me to play a game where we pulled down our pants and ran around in a circle, with her chanting, “I see a little boy’s popo,” and me chanting, “I see a little girl’s popo.” She was worried that her two older brothers might see us doing this. I felt uneasy to be on this odd girl’s team instead of her brothers’ side.

  The thing I liked best at Barbie’s house was an amazing toy circus that she and her brothers had upstairs in their play room. There were dozens of little tin animals and acrobats, a little ring, a tightrope and a tiny trapeze. I used to dream about that circus a lot, over and over, especially when I’d have a fever.

  I’d be in a circus big top—and, in a way, it was like a spaceship. I’d be sitting in the bleachers off to one side, watching the thin, bright shapes that spun above the center. These acrobatic beings were like flames, like twisting neon tubes, and the other seats were populated by moving lights as well, with tiny little creatures scuttling around my feet.

  I’d imagine th
at I myself was a creature of light, and that the flame people were planning to push me down beneath the bleachers, down into the world of ordinary humans, to mingle with them and find out what they’re like. Eventually I’d incorporate this early vision in my science fiction novel, The Secret of Life.

  Once, perhaps in 1952 as well, a driving-group mother started grilling me about Mom’s accent.

  “She’s from Germany,” I told the woman.

  “Oh,” she said, sweetening her voice. “Is she a war bride?”

  “I guess so,” I said, having no idea what that meant.

  At home my mother explained that a war bride was a woman who’d married an invading soldier, and that she herself would never do something that tacky. Mom had come to the U.S. before the war. She’d come as an art student, and had met my father in Philadelphia. And the woman who’d been questioning me was a catty old bag.

  Later I’d come to understand that three of Mom’s sixteen great-great-grandparents had been Jewish, which could eventually have doomed her family to Hitler’s camps. This precise racial calculus was characteristic of the time. My Uncle Franz would tell me that the family had been eager for Mom, the youngest child, to make it out of Germany in time.

  Among Mom’s other ancestors was the famous philosopher Georg Hegel. I remember the relationship under the rubric, “three greats,” that is, I’m Hegel’s great-great-great-grandson. When my mother left Berlin before World War II, she brought with her Hegel’s schoolboy diary—a treasured family memento. Written mostly in Latin, the little book covers the period 1785 to 1787, when Hegel was fifteen to seventeen years old. Eventually my mother lent it to some scholars who translated it into German.

  In later years I’d find a favorite passage where Hegel is excited about a rumor among the local peasants that an army of dead souls had ridden by the night before. Shades of a UFO sighting! As it turns out, the peasants had been deceived by the lights of passing carriages from a late party.