Nested Scrolls Read online

  And then I started pulling my cousin Hedwig’s pigtails.

  My German relatives still talk about what a brat I was.

  Three years later, in 1953 when I was seven, Mom took Embry and me to Germany again. This time we rode across the ocean on a ship, a tramp steamer called the Karl Fisser. There were only four or five passengers in all.

  I didn’t like most of the food on the ship, it wasn’t like any food I was used to. My mother prevailed on the cook to make me spaghetti and, above all, pancakes. The crew got wind of this—probably they were intrigued by my attractive, aristocratic mother—and they began calling me Prinz Pfannkuchen. Prince Pancake.

  The toilet paper on the ship was too stiff, so I threw it out the bathroom porthole onto the deck. It rolled around in the wind and festooned everything. To find soft toilet paper, I took to sneaking up to the captain’s plush bathroom.

  During the trip, the crew painted the ship’s railings, and Embry and I climbed on them while the paint was wet, for which we were scolded.

  The trip took a long time. We saw dolphins and flying fish, and a water-spout. There were any number of passageways and gray steel decks with narrow stairs leading among them. Embry and I got into playing a dangerous game. I had a tight, red knitted hat, and one of us would pull the hat down over our eyes and let the other boy guide him around, like, “Walk forward, turn left, turn right,” and so on.

  We began talking about the terrible possibility that one of us might get the other to walk unsuspectingly onto a downward flight of steps. And then I decided to do it to Embry before he did it to me.

  “Step forward,” I said, giggling—not really expecting him to hurt himself.

  The ship pitched as Embry stepped into the empty space above the steps. He fell forward and slid down the whole flight on his stomach, banging his mouth, bloodying his front teeth.

  I felt horrible.

  Back in our suburb of Louisville, Kentucky, my absolute favorite reading materials were the Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge comic books by Carl Barks. Once a week I’d accompany my mother to the A & P Supermarket, and she’d give me a nickel for a comic.

  I loved the irreverence of the ducks and the energetic, abbreviated way in which the narratives hopped from one frame to the next. I learned a lot from those comic books, including authorial tone, story construction, and vocabulary. When grown-ups would ask me how it was that I knew the meaning of some unusual word, I enjoyed telling them I’d learned it from Donald Duck comics.

  By now some of my school friends had televisions. One boy lived within walking distance, and at his house I saw a Howdy Doody show. It was the first TV show I’d ever seen.

  I could hardly believe how great television was—the creamy black and white shades, the hiss of static, the announcer’s rounded tones, the jerky scan across the children in the Howdy Doody audience, the hilarious commercials for Ipana toothpaste.

  There were some great ads for Jell-O as well. In one Jell-O ad, a warm housewife voice would sing-song, “Busy day, busy day,” as her cartoon icon hurried around. And then would come the punch-line: “Jell-O tonight!” Another Jell-O ad had the tag line, “Chinese baby very happy”—the happiness came when the baby was given a spoon instead of chopsticks for eating his Jell-O. I loved that baby. I’d never seen a Chinese person in real life.

  I didn’t actually like the puppet Howdy Doody himself—he disgusted me, with the awkward waggling of his lower jaw. And I hated his conniving friend/enemy Clarabelle the clown. Nor did I like the show’s smarmy host, Buffalo Bill. But near the end of the show came the payoff: they’d air a cartoon. The cartoons were paradise.

  My brother and I worked on our parents, and eventually they agreed to get a TV set. We went to a department store in downtown Louisville, and Pop negotiated with the salesman for nearly an hour. Embry and I watched a cowboy show on the dozens of display TVs, the horsemen eternally riding down a sandy road beneath dry, spindly trees.

  We went home with a Dumont set, a small tube in a cubical yellowish cabinet that might have been particle-board. You could get two channels in Louisville, 3 and 11. And at 4 p.m. on Saturday afternoons I’d get to watch Cartoon Circus.

  I worshipped that show. To make it even better, when I watched Cartoon Circus, Mom would give me my one soft-drink of the week, orange soda in a pale green anodized aluminum cup.

  Everything about the cartoons was wonderful. The exultant blare of chase music, the high slangy voices, the xylophone sound of sneaking footsteps, the moany-groany graveyards with twisting ghosts, the sarcastic ducks, the battles and stratagems of the cats and the mice.

  One Saturday afternoon my father for some reason wanted to take me for a drive in the car.

  “No, no! I have to watch Cartoon Circus.”

  “Oh, don’t worry, we can hear it on the car radio.”

  I wasn’t quite sure if watching cartoons on the radio would work—and then, of course, it turned out that there wasn’t any cartoon radio show at all. But I didn’t nag my father on it. He seemed a little sad and distracted. Perhaps he and Mom were having a fight.

  My parents were friends with the Graves family, who lived in a shiny log cabin even further out in the country than us. Grant Graves was the church organist, quite a musician, and Lillian Graves was my teacher in second and third grades They were cultured, pure people, who appreciated my mother—in these postwar years, some people still harbored a dislike for Germans. But Grant had studied in Germany and had played a concert in a cathedral there. He had a poster for it on his wall.

  One time in 1953, the Graves family had a house party and my family was there, enjoying ourselves. I was talking to some big kids, telling them I was in the third grade, and one of the older girls said she was in the tenth grade. I was stunned. I had no idea the grades went up that high.

  Around this time, my father, my mother and I drove out to a well-to-do friend’s country retreat to get big flat river rocks for Mom to put into her rose garden.

  “What do you want to be when you grow up?” the landowner asked me.

  “A businessman,” I replied, wanting to be like Pop. He seemed to get a lot of pleasure out of his little furniture company.

  “Oh, don’t be a businessman, Rudy,” said my father. “You can do better than that. You’re bright.”

  “Then I’ll be a scientist,” I said.

  My parents tended to send me to bed before I was really tired. So I’d play mental games while I was waiting to fall asleep. I developed a little repertoire of fun things to think about: fantastic powers like shrinking, or breathing underwater. Perhaps all along I was meant to be a science fiction writer.

  Some of these imaginings still stick in my mind. One evening, perhaps in 1954, I imagined being an inch tall and walking around my room. The space beneath my bed was like a dim, dusty hall. The mouse that sometimes invaded our house was there, the size of a horse. He could talk, and he was friendly. I rode the mouse into the kitchen and got us two slices of apple pie with chunks of cheddar cheese. It was more than we could possibly eat, but we tried.

  I made myself still smaller, the size of one of the dust specks I sometimes noticed floating in the air. I drifted across the kitchen, through the grill of the window screen and into the night. A gentle breeze set me down upon a blooming, luminous flower at the top of our magnolia tree. I took a swim in a dewdrop resting on the flower’s petals. Music chimed from the palace-like structure at the flower’s center.

  Other times I’d imagine an endless stream of bare-breasted women walking into my room. They’d pose in the light from the hall, smile at me with lipsticked mouths, and move on. I didn’t understand yet why I liked to think about them. But they lulled me to sleep.

  I often had flying dreams—in the dreams I’d launch myself by hopping backwards, and instead of crashing to the ground, I’d angle upwards and float on my back as if I were in a swimming pool. Taking off from our house’s front yard, I might shoot up through the clouds and follow the light
to downtown Louisville where the big buildings were. I’d fly still higher to where the air was cold and thin.

  And then—as so often happened—I’d lose the ability to fly. So long as I believed flight was possible, I could stay aloft, but the minute I doubted myself, I’d began a long tumble, with the air beating at my face.

  At this point, I’d usually wake up and lie there, thinking things over. I remember once, still half-asleep, I managed to sculpt this recurrent dream into a happy outcome. I was still falling, but there was a hole in the ground below me, so I didn’t have to crash. Yes, I was falling into a bottomless shaft that went down forever. In the dream again, I looked around, enjoying myself. Lava dripped from the distant rocky walls, small goblins peeped at me. I would fall forever and a day, on and on, world without end.

  Schoolboy

  In the fourth grade, that is, in 1954, I switched from the idyllic St. Francis School to the boys-only Louisville Country Day school. I hated Country Day for all of the five years that I attended it.

  Why was I there? My big brother Embry had gotten into trouble at his latest school—he’d called one of his teachers “Miss Gumwad” to her face, and he’d kicked a hole in the building’s outside wall. So my parents were sending him to the private school most favored by Louisville’s elite. I was following in his wake.

  We wore a kind of school uniform: blue corduroy coats, gray chinos, white shirts, blue and gray striped ties—but as a group we were somewhat motley, for our parents could buy our prescribed garments wherever they liked. Mine were hand-me-downs from Embry, who was four grades ahead of me. Mom would shorten his old shirt sleeves by sewing folds into them. With my sloppy necktie and ill-fitting jacket, I looked like a waif, a circus worker, an immigrant scientist.

  Backpacks were still unheard of. We boys toted heavily-laden leather satchels from one class to the next, and used them to lug home the books we needed to study from. The satchels had a single handle at the top, and their soft sides opened like jaws. My satchel was a medium tan, and it was nearly new. I liked it. It smelled nice.

  We got a hot lunch at Country Day, all eight grades sitting on benches along the shiny maple-wood tables that we also used for study hall. A teacher sat at the head of each table, supervising. The food was dreadful, but only once did I have a table-master who cared if I cleaned my plate. That guy was an unpleasant red-haired guy with an Australian accent and stained teeth. He called himself Colonel Sands. In study hall, I’d draw pictures of low-flying airplanes firing machine-gun rounds into him.

  I was younger and smaller than most of the boys in fourth grade. Some of the others were snobs and bullies. Many of them seemed to know each other from before. I was immediately in the low range of the pecking order. I never really questioned this—children tend to accept life’s indignities as inevitable.

  But, looking back, how could those other kids already think they were better than me—in the fourth grade? Of all the outrage. Maybe it was because my parents weren’t in the Louisville Country Club, or because I was dressed like an immigrant circus worker, or because I was prone to staring off into space while I thought about things.

  From the earliest days, I’ve had a tendency to get deeply involved in the sights and sounds around me, to study the patterns and colors of stones and walls, to track the gentle movements of air-tossed leaves, to ponder the changing curlicues of the clouds, or to savor the sliding flow of water.

  My mother had a frightening German book from her own childhood that she’d half-jokingly read to us. It was called Struwelpeter, and was filled with intriguingly detailed and old-fashioned color drawings.

  In nearly all of the book’s six or seven adventures, a child’s misbehavior is punished by death. In one story, a boy named Robert opens an umbrella in a storm, the wind carries him into the sky, and he’s never seen again. In another tale, Kaspar won’t eat the food his mother serves, so he shrivels away to a stick and dies, his grave marked by a stone soup tureen. And Hans Stare-in-the-Air gazes too much at the clouds while walking, so he falls into a river and nearly drowns.

  I was, and still am, Hans Stare-in-the-Air. I like clouds much more than sidewalks.

  So anyway, my status was low at Louisville Country Day, but there were some boys further down than me. Sam Manly, for instance, liked to carry his satchel outside to the vacant lot where we had recess—he used it as a defense weapon, swinging the satchel like a mace when the meaner boys tried to prey upon him.

  There was even a boy whom the senior boys had stuffed into a canvas duffel bag which they’d thrown all around the locker room, letting him thump against the floors and walls.

  And ferret-faced Jimmy Vale was so peculiar that hardly anyone but me would even talk to him—he was full of wild, confusing stories about sex. Vale came from a large family living in a small house, and he knew about bodily functions from close up. Once when I clumsily spilled some pee onto my pants in the bathroom, Vale sniffed me appraisingly and said, “You smell like a baby.” You could learn a lot from a guy like Vale.

  One day in 1955 when I was nine, Mom was driving Embry and me back from school and, peering ahead of us from the car, I said, “Look at the hay wagon!”

  Mom and Embry began to laugh. “That’s a school bus,” said Embry. I’d mistaken the mounded yellow shape with its black lettering for—a cart of hay with bars around it.

  “You have to get glasses,” said Mom.

  I was uneasy that the other boys would tease me for wearing glasses, so I selected a pair with pink semi-transparent frames, supposing that frames like this might blend into my skin and be unnoticeable.

  It was a revelation when I stepped out of the store onto Fourth Street in downtown Louisville. With my glasses on, I could see the fine features of the tops of buildings. I’d never realized before that I was near-sighted. It was wonderful to see so much detail.

  Most of my Country Day teachers were unjust and incompetent.

  Mr. Murden, the perpetually aggrieved history teacher, would give us pop quizzes, grade them on the spot, and announce “goose egg” when handing back the papers that he’d graded zero. Once he showed up at school with a bruised cheek and a black eye that he said he’d gotten from a hitchhiker. We boys were quietly exultant.

  I well recall the red-faced Mr. Flagg, but not which subject I had him for—as he never actually taught anything. He’d spend every class period holding forth about his resentments towards rich people, towards “pansies,” towards barbers who raised their prices, towards intellectuals, and towards his neighbor who’d tried putting a move on Mr. Flagg’s pure flower of a wife while Mr. Flagg was in the john during a drunken party last Saturday night.

  My fifth-grade math teacher, Mr. Viol, once assigned us the wrong page number to study—the page he named was a blurred, gray photograph of shoppers at a New York City fruit-stand. I suppose the illustration was meant to dramatize the value of arithmetic in daily life. Taking revenge upon us for his error, Mr. Viol gave us a quiz with questions like, “On the page you studied, what was the price of apples per pound? What kind of fruit was resting on the scale? How many shoppers were present?”

  Although I was becoming less and less interested in my studies, I did learn one memorable thing at Country Day: how to diagram sentences. I’d never realized it was possible to dissect a sentence into the component parts of subject and predicate, of nouns and adjectives, of verbs and adverbs—with prepositional phrases veering off on little alleys with labels: for, by, of, into, from.

  Mr. Herrick, who taught me about this, enjoyed discussions about the fine points of diagramming. He was a lean man, somewhat world-weary and cynical. He had a permanently bloody spot on his dimpled chin where he cut himself shaving every morning.

  His English class was almost like an anatomy class, with our language presenting ever new forms to be mapped. And when we were assigned a homework project of composing and diagramming sample sentences, I had my first taste of literary creativity, crafting sentences with fan
cy words and dramatic situations.

  “After placing his latest victim’s head into the simmering kettle, Bloody Bill dragged the rest of the body into the basement, where he interred it beside the others.”

  Good old Mr. Herrick never tried to staunch my creativity.

  One afternoon a classmate and I were out riding bikes, and on some random subdivision street, we encountered Mr. Herrick putting away his lawn-mower. It was strange to see him out of context, living an ordinary life. He asked us if we’d like to come inside for a soda.

  “No, no,” we said, embarrassed—although then we regretted our modesty, wanting the free soda, and we circled around in front of his house for ten minutes, to no avail.

  The other good teacher I had at Country Day was my seventh-grade math teacher, a colorless man called Williams. You wouldn’t remember seeing him if you passed him on the street. The spectral Williams showed us how to use these strange little pamphlets of tables that listed the logarithms of numbers, also their sine and cosine values. You could do some amazingly complicated things with these pamphlets—and to make it more exciting Williams taught us a method of so-called interpolation for guessing, say, the sine of an angle that didn’t actually appear in the table, basing your guess on the values of the sines of the next larger and next smaller angles. And one day Williams really went wild and taught us how to calculate square roots by hand, without using the logarithm tables, but by instead using an intensely paper-and-pencil method somewhat like long division.

  Probably I was the only boy in the class who understood what was going on, but I didn’t realize this. By then I was discouraged and beaten-down, both by the bullies and by the generally poor teaching. I no longer thought of myself as being bright, or a good student.

  One particular boy at Country Day, a Peter Bunce, picked on me the most—this would have been in 1956 when I was ten. Bunce called me, “Suck,” perhaps because it rhymed with my last name, a name which was my cross to bear through all those years of middle school. Peter Bunce would lean over me, his voice a mocking falsetto, crooning, “Suck’s a big boy now,” as if I were a toddler learning to walk. I didn’t understand why he hated me.