Coming to Terms with a Transylvanian Heritage

The Girl Who Never Came Back And Other Essays

John Karl

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Contents

Present at the Creation • 1 Attending the party where your parents fell in love

2e Girl Who Never Came Back • 12 A renegade stepmother’s gift of sport

Haunted Homeland • 58 Coming to terms with a Transylvanian heritage

2is Joy, 2is Freedom, 2is Challenge • 87 Re!ections on a lifetime of running

In the Ashes of Music Row • 115 A "nal visit to New York’s legendary street of music shops

Two Left Hands • 130 Concerning a certain minority

2ere Used to be a Ballpark • 156 Of fan dancers, hog-calling contests, donkey ball, and exploding scoreboards

My Name, My Destiny • 209 #e age-old search for divine messages in our names

2e Choice • 229 A mother’s secret suitor emerges in pages from the past

Bohemian Rhapsody • 268 Dreaming of Paris on the Upper West Side

The Girl Who Never Came Back And Other Essays

Present at the Creation Attending the party where your parents fell in love

onight, I attended the party where my teenaged T parents met and fell in love. It was a hot July evening in Manhattan, and the art studio was loud, smoky, crowded with college students; tables were cluttered with spent wine bottles and over4ow- ing ashtrays; modern jazz skirled from a record player and drifted outside through large windows 4ung open to the city’s tropical heat. I’d felt a thrill when I pushed on the studio door and it swung away to reveal the revelry within — when I realized that the two pages I held, after searching through boxes of my parents’ papers, were my mother’s memories of the party, written a few weeks later, in August 1956. “I don’t know what it was that brought us together with such violence that night,” she began, and the words set me back a moment. 2eir suggestion of bodice-ripping erotica gave me pause, but more signi5cantly, I saw that these two pages of typed red ink told a story I had long sought. At my dining room table, I read on as my nineteen-year- old mother recounted for her 5fty-year-old son a Dionysian celebration that would lead to my parents’ courtship and

3 T!" G#$% W!& N"'"$ C()" B(*+ (,- O.!"$ E//(0/ marriage, the births of two boys, divorce, remarriages, and all the rest of our shared and separate destinies. 2rough my mother’s pages — and the discovery later in the night of my father’s account of the party — I was given a child’s singular privilege: to be present at his parents’ 5rst kiss.

A11 7,&1/$#' %.- (,#&$ 8%$#'(. to tell the story of how they met and married, as awareness dawns that those in their home haven’t always shared a roof. However, children have di9culty believing in a world before their birth or that their parents had once been young and romantic. And I had an additional barrier to imagining my parents’ earlier life: I had no recollection of their living marriage. 2ey had separated before my brother and I were in elementary school and they had soon remarried. I had never, in memory, even seen them together in the same room. 2ey were linked only by telephone, from their new apartments on opposite edges of our island — my father in the Village, near the Hudson River, my mother on the Lower East Side, near the East River. 2ey spoke rarely, and only to arrange their sons’ visits with their father or to discuss his alimony and child-support payments. 2ese conversations, parts of which I sometimes overheard from one apartment or the other, were brief and businesslike, though occasionally their tone turned bitter, and ended with my father shouting or my mother cursing and slamming the receiver. Once, in a rage, she grabbed a vase from a table and 4ung it across our living room, shattering a window, which set me wailing in fear. 2ose months following their separation were a dark period for both of them, and particularly for her. She was a single mother, nearly alone in Manhattan, struggling to emerge

6 P$#.#'( %( (,# C$#%(&!' from the wreckage of a marriage, without a career, without a cohesive family to return to in Ohio, and with two demanding, disorderly boys under her wing. I remember her then as often unresponsive, distracted, and withdrawn — qualities quite uncharacteristic of her, though her diary pages con5rm this memory. At the end of one sad, dreary day in 1969, she concluded an entry: “I want to go home, but I don’t know where home is or how to get there. I’d like to put my head down somewhere, but there is nowhere to put it.”

Y#( (,#$# ,%/ *##' % (&;#, I knew, when we had been a true family, when we’d all lived together near Gramercy Park, on a quiet street of red-brick townhouses and pre-war apartment buildings. I imagined those unremembered years as our lost golden age, but with only my parents’ overheard phone calls to go by, I couldn’t quite picture that sunlit time, even as I yearned for it. It felt terribly important to possess that story, like something warm and alive held inside my coat while I navigated our bleak new world of weekend visits, apartment moves, strange schools, remarriages, a resisted stepfather, and the muggings which my brother and I were learning to endure in the slum that would later gain notoriety as Alphabet City. 2e story of my parents’ meeting was our Book of Genesis; Gramercy Park was our Garden of Eden before the exile. (I once dragged my reluctant mother to make a pilgrimage to our former home, to prove to myself that this dreamed-of place was real; the ordinary apartment building I confronted was deeply disappointing.) I clung to a fading hope that my mother and father would reunite, despite their marriages. I was ignorant of

: T!" G#$% W!& N"'"$ C()" B(*+ (,- O.!"$ E//(0/ how thoroughly my parents’ love had been destroyed by years of rancor, of spiteful acts, of betrayals, of bruising words, of unspoken resentments, and hopeless misunderstandings. Only the responsibilities owed to their sons compelled them to speak, by telephone. 2ey had embarked on new, divergent paths, while I persisted with tiresome questions about how they had met and married and why they had separated. Still, they were loving parents and no doubt discerned the sense of loss that prompted their son’s interrogations. 2ey answered honestly yet cautiously, creating a sort of cordon sanitaire around their marriage, which, I believe, was the best they could o=er under the circumstances. 2ey would not have gone so far as to coordinate their responses, but these were weirdly similar, so that I had virtually the same, repeated conversations in their apartments: “We met at a party,” they said. “How did you meet there? What sort of a party was it?” “It was a college party.” “Did you know that you loved each other right away and that you’d get married?” “Yes, we knew right away. We loved each other very much.” “If you loved each other, why did you get divorced?” “People change,” they said. 2rough such judicious replies my parents thwarted all attempts to form the picture, the story, I sought of their 5rst love, which had created our family, and to fathom their divorce, which had rent it. 2eir unvarying answers acquired a ritualized quality: they knew what I’d ask, I knew what they’d say. Nevertheless, I took some comfort in these

< P$#.#'( %( (,# C$#%(&!' exchanges; it reassured me to hear them say “your mother” or “your father” without bitterness, because it allowed me to believe they hadn’t completely forgotten their love. In adolescence, I culled a few more particulars about their early romance. Perhaps my questions became more incisive, or my parents decided I was old enough to hear more of the truth, or the distance of years had made such discussions less emotionally fraught for them, or some combination of all of these. But whatever the reason, by the time I left for college, I‘d gathered these facts: In July 1956, my parents were students at Antioch College, in Ohio. My father was in Manhattan, preparing to travel by freighter to Paris, where he would spend the better part of a year studying French literature at the Sorbonne. My mother, as it happened, was also in the city, working at a medical insurance company for academic credit, through the college’s work-study program. She and three other Antioch girls lived on West Fifty-seventh Street, in Sherwood Studios, a nineteenth-century building which had o=ered spacious, high-ceilinged ateliers for generations of artists. On July 31, my mother turned nineteen. Her roommates threw her a party that evening. My father was among the guests. He and my mother had been aware of each other through mutual friends at college, but it wasn’t until the party that they spoke. All of these facts my parents in time had revealed. But there was one fact that I discovered only when I explored their papers: the night she met my father, my mother was engaged to be married to an Antioch student of Dutch descent named Jan DeVries, who was away in Chicago that summer, working at a theater.

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A0(#$ ;+ 8%$#'(.’ /#%(,. — my father died in 2010, my mother three years later — I stowed their papers in a closet. As writers and indefatigable diarists, who had saved, it seems, every letter, photograph, telegram, bill, ticket stub, and child’s scribble, along with pictures and keepsakes of their forebears, they had accumulated between them a vast family archive, which over4owed a half-dozen boxes as large as steamer trunks. When I occasionally ventured to browse among their contents, I was both overwhelmed by the richness of this joint record of a marriage and profoundly shocked by my parents’ blunt candor about the most intimate aspects of their loving but turbulent twelve-year relationship. If in my boyhood my parents had kept their marriage a closed book, now it was very much an open book — indeed, an abundance of open books: diaries and notebooks and journals and binders, all awaiting me, unguarded. Tight-lipped with their son, my parents were wildly loquacious on paper. But their archive was so large and haphazard, so likely strewn with emotional tripwires that I balked at delving in deeply. 2en, my daughter asked me, out of the blue, how my wife and I had met, and I was reminded of my own questions to my parents about the party where they’d fallen in love. 2eir story, their full story, I believed — I hoped — would be found somewhere within these great boxes. I hauled them, like treasure chests, to our dining room, and read late into the night, pulling up handfuls of papers like jewels. As the hours passed, the diaries and letters and loose pages spread across the table and rose in ever higher piles, while outside my windows the apartment-buildings’

? P$#.#'( %( (,# C$#%(&!' lights winked out, one by one. Eventually, at random, I opened a folder which held a miscellany that included my mother’s personal phone book, a few letters, snapshots of her as a girl with her family in Ohio, her father’s penknife, and two age-browned, folded pages bound with a rusted paperclip. Unfolding these pages, I saw the typed words in red ink: “I don’t know what it was that brought us together with such violence that night,” and realized I’d stumbled on what I’d been searching for. As I read on, I was following my teenaged mother through the art studio’s door into the spectral party which I had sought since boyhood.

M+ ;!(,#$ '%$$%(#/, in fulsome detail be5tting an aspiring novelist, how the summer evening began — the exuberant jazz on the record player, the high-spirited students, the haze of cigarette smoke — and she wrote of what happened when she sat beside my father on a sofa and spoke with him for the 5rst time:

As we drank together (and suddenly we were together), we talked. Somehow — I suppose it was the wine — we opened up to one another, and discovered with wonder that parts of each were so alike as to be almost-disturbing. Almost-disturbing, but wonderful. We talked mostly about writing, I think. I don’t remember too much — just that we were, at one time, lying across my bed talking, and looking at one another with surprise — occasionally lowering our eyes in a moment of self-consciousness, or too great a dawning of awareness. 2en we were in the cluttered kitchen — drinking recklessly, laughing with a sudden closeness. 2e wine was pushing us higher and higher, and I saw Arno, dark and intense, as a person who was so very much like me that I was beginning to wonder if I had found a missing piece of my soul.

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She becomes dizzy from the wine and lies on her bed, in a dark room, alone with my father. “I was feeling wonderful,” she writes, “free and warm”:

2ere was noise all about, and many conversations, and many people. I felt a great 4ow of life in my veins — alive and warm and a woman. Arno said something to me and I turned my face toward him. He was very close. We were both sweating in the July heat — our faces 4ushed, eyes wine-bright. But he was warmer than I. I could feel the pulsating heat of his body — it engulfed him, it was engul5ng me. And then, from nowhere, I heard my own voice. “Arno?” it said. And he answered, a deep but wine-soft, very male “yes?” and then my voice again. ”Kiss me, Arno,” it said. And then the heat of our two bodies, the pounding of our pulses, our hearts, the wonder of the meeting of our mouths. He was furiously warm, I remember that most, and his warmth penetrated and covered me. His arms were strong. I was slipping away beneath the passion and fury which Arno had suddenly become…

Later, they lay quietly, the party going on in other rooms. “We heard everything, we were glad to be where we were, and we just smiled at one another.” She whispers in my father’s ear: “You know? I could love you very easily.” She falls asleep:

Arno woke me. He was dressed and looked as if he hadn’t slept. Sunlight was coming in from the transom. I asked him what time it was and he told me. If I hurried, I would be just a few minutes late for work. I didn’t want to hurry. I didn’t want to go to work.

She calls in sick to her o9ce and sits with my father, her roommates, and a handful of remaining guests for a weary breakfast amid the studio’s post-party disarray. Here, her

A P$#.#'( %( (,# C$#%(&!' diary entry ends; the breakfasters and the studio dissolve into blank paper. I stared at the blankness, stunned.

I( C%. C#11 8%.( ;&/'&),( when I found my father’s remembrance of the party. A single, typed sheet, it had been buried among his voluminous Paris notebooks. Holding it, I felt the same keen thrill I had at 5nding my mother’s pages. 2eir versions, it turned out, were quite similar. 2ey both evoke a sort of enchanted bacchanal in Manhattan, where wine, revelry, music, and sultry heat all mingle to create a magical atmosphere. My father recalled the morning:

I woke with the 5rst muddy blotches of dawn creeping into the bedroom through the transom. I got out of bed, put on my shirt, and went through the kitchen into the main room. Everyone was asleep. My head was just beginning to be completely clear of the wine, but the numbness of sleep held it in a thick grip. I went to the window and looked out on Sixth Avenue. As I leaned out the window, I caught a smell, a smell at once soothing and exciting. It was on the sleeve of my shirt. 2e rough 4annel had taken the odor of Francie’s hair. Sixth Avenue was gray and empty. I returned to the bedroom. Francie was sleeping deeply, her face to the wall, arm tucked to her body and the other on the pillow. I sat beside her, overwhelmed. I knew as I sat there I would never forget. I told myself that it was an incident, that I would let it pass, nothing would be said and things would go on as before — and yet never could I forget that morning, alone in a sleeping house, sitting beside Francie as she slept, 5lled with a tenderness I have never known before. Seeing her high cheeks, the lips a little too full, the thick hair, my 5ngers crying to touch her — again and again the same sensation has returned to me, returns to me now. It is something I cannot name. Perhaps

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Francie herself would call it magic. Sartre says it is adventure. I am confused — I don’t know what it is. I can only think that perhaps it is love.

2ere is nothing more. My father’s writing, like my mother’s, left me staring at an age-browned page. Earlier in the night, my mother’s words had brought back to me her young, lively voice, the voice I’d known as a boy; now, my father, too, had come back, but as a dreamy, ardent nineteen-year-old. Together, these two teenagers were telling their son their story, the love story they would withhold all their lives. At last, I’d seen my parents together in the same room.

B!(, !0 (,#&$ /&%$&#. abruptly go silent for several weeks. I 5nd out why from a brief letter that my mother wrote, though didn’t send, toward the end this time, to a girlfriend at college. She explains that from the moment she and my father had left the breakfast at the studio, they’d been roaming the city and making love in his sublet apartment, “hardly stopping to sleep or eat.” 2ey 4oated along Fifth Avenue, Central Park, the Village. 2eir neglected diaries attest to their new love as forcefully as all their words. Only once does my father pause, while my mother rests beside him in bed one hot afternoon, to write in his notebook a solitary, heartfelt entry:

Francesca! I love her as I have never loved anyone; I have shown her, of my own desiring and not because she asked it, a patience and gentleness of which I did not think myself capable. I hover between a hundred emotions at the sight of her sleeping, 2inking of marriage — something I would have laughed at two weeks ago.

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Given time, that time we don’t have, I could write such things for her as no one has ever written.

2e end of their Manhattan idyll was indeed near. It came when my father kissed my mother farewell on the deck of a Paris-bound freighter. He would live in Europe for seven months, during which they would correspond almost daily. Back at college, they would resume their romance, and my mother would break her engagement to Jan DeVries. 2ree years after the party, in 1959, my parents would marry, and our life as a family would begin.

2015

33 The Girl Who Never Came Back A renegade stepmother’s gift of sport

t was my stepmother who brought sport into our lives. I My earliest memory of her — earlier than even her face — is of her skis. I see them, 5fty years ago, standing against a wall in a dim corner of her Greenwich Village apartment, where my father brings us to visit her before they marry. 2ey are old wooden alpine skis, slender and long, tapering to sharp, upturned points; and, strikingly, they are a rich Prussian blue — the lacquer bears marks from countless mountain adventures. 2ere is something archaic and graceful and faintly menacing about them, these great, scarred, pointed sticks, like the curved Yew- wood bows of medieval archers, or the proud, spiraled prows of Viking war ships. To a small boy who has never seen skis, they tower inscrutable, awesome, vaguely martial rather than sporting. What were they meant for? Where were they from? How did this young woman come to own such enormous, barbaric objects? 2ey fascinate me. And they remain in memory an image of wonder — they gleam

36 T,# G&$1 W,! N#"#$ C%;# B%7- timelessly in that dimness like ancient arms, like twin blue 4ames in a Zoroastrian 5re temple. 2en, one special night, my stepmother carried them into the living room for my younger brother and me. I remember standing on them and feeling as though I’d sprouted legs of an enormous insect. 2e poles I held were of bamboo, with worn, limp-leather handle-straps, and, at the tips, round leather baskets: even then, in the late sixties, those poles and skis were antiques. Barbara’s 5ngers gently molded my body into a skiing tuck, leaned me forward with knees bent, the poles poised close at my sides, and she explained that with these long, ungainly planks you could “whoosh down the mountain snows!” She smiled at me with girlish delight, and she suddenly seemed transformed into a girl herself, scarcely older than I was — a blonde, 5ne-featured, fresh-faced girl, like a maiden in an Icelandic saga who had favored me with a mystic secret. I imagined myself whooshing down the snows; and as she described the thrill of skiing, I also imagined her on the snows. She was easy to picture on skis — unlike my mother. My mother was Jewish, dark, voluptuous, statuesque, like movie stars of the 5fties, built for lounging in sultry languor on a velvet chaise lounge or a haystack before a camera. Barbara was in all ways her physical opposite: tall, angular, built perfectly for sport. Her golden hair was cropped short, in a mod shag of the time, as though to 5t comfortably under a bathing cap or riding helmet. Yes, I could easily see her whooshing down a mountain, kicking up snow-clouds in her skis of blue, a color somehow both swashbuckling and ladylike.

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2at night, she told a story about the skis. She leaned intimately toward us, as though telling a fairy tale: long ago, she had waitressed at an enchanted town named Aspen, high away in the clouds in the Colorado Rockies, and there she had lived in a cottage at the base of a mountain with a black wolf-hound, and there she had learned to ski. We stood before her, two city boys, mute with awe. I yearned to whoosh down the slopes with a child’s feverish urgency. We begged her to take us skiing right away — that very night, or tomorrow at the latest. My brother, who was perhaps four years old, began jumping and tugging her sleeve. Barbara, laughing, turned in helpless appeal to my father, who had been watching the scene from the sofa. He had been unusually silent, and I had forgotten he was there. Now, I too turned to him. But what I saw frightened me: his face had turned to stone.

S8!$( C%. % 0!$*&//#' -&')/!; for my father. We did not yet know this, that night at Barbara’s apartment. His ghastly expression and noncommittal replies to our pleas to go skiing would prove our 5rst, unsettling hints. An aversion to sport would be, for many, a tri4ing 4aw in a husband or father; but in our family, sport became the marital Western Front, nearly until my father’s death, of emphysema from smoking, at age seventy-three, in 2010. I believe my father was daunted by two central aspects of sport, or at least of the upper-class sports that Barbara loved: their setting in green or watery or alpine nature, and their call for the display of the body’s primal grace in action. Both terri5ed him.

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Barbara Adams, skiing at Aspen, circa 1962.

My father should have excelled at sports. He was, when I was young, a handsome man, with thick black hair 4ecked with early gray, strong features, and broad shoulders; he had a vigorous body, which he kept trim into old age, and he had a keen competitive streak, which was evident in his work as an author and editor. But for reasons rooted in childhood, he was deeply ill at ease in both his own skin and in the natural world. Growing up in a modest middle-class home in Philadelphia, of assimilated Jewish parents, he hadn’t played sports. He had never swung a golf club, or run a race in a 5eld, or hiked a forest trail, or sat atop horse, or swam in a lake. His youth was spent absorbing the dinner-table talk of the painters, writers, composers, and musicians, prominent and obscure, who were drawn to his mother,

3> T!" G#$% W!& N"'"$ C()" B(*+ (,- O.!"$ E//(0/ a devotee of the arts; or he delved among his books, or he examined the tiny, fantastic, warring creatures revealed by the searching lenses of his beloved microscope. Like those lenses, his mind was made for searching, for probing, for relentlessly seeing. He was, by any measure, but especially to a boy, dazzlingly brilliant, with an astonishing fund of knowledge. He’d developed exquisitely re5ned tastes, and he dispensed a shrewd practical wisdom to me and my brother which in retrospect evokes Lord Chester5eld’s counsels to his son. With his erudition, literary gifts, and ribald wit, my father belonged in the London co=ee houses of Samuel Johnson’s day, or in the Mermaid Tavern with the Elizabethan playwrights, or in the Paris salons with the Encyclopedists. He would expound on a vast range of topics — the causes of the Civil War, neglected eighteenth-century French poets, the evolution of modern jazz, critiques of Fitche’s ethics, masters of the Japanese print, the history of biology. Intellectually, he was fearless, would leap naked into a China Sea of ideas, or ski a philosophic Everest; but confronted with a real sea, he could hardly bear to wade into the surf; faced with real skis, he’d retreat into stony silence. Only once in my childhood did we toss a ball. No doubt I made his life intolerable until he relented. I had just gotten my 5rst baseball glove and a hardball (gifts from my stepfather, who was only slightly less averse to sport and nature). My father steered me to a dreary city playground, the hot concrete swarming with kids on the summer Saturday. He was over-dressed in a brown sport coat, and he was sti= and uncomfortable, often missing the ball or throwing wild, after which he’d mutter, shaking his head, silently scolding himself and checking his hands

3? T,# G&$1 W,! N#"#$ C%;# B%7- for injury. He drew bemused stares from other parents, which he was apparently oblivious to but which morti5ed me. 2at was the 5rst time I saw my father critically — a dismaying and vertiginous peep over the hedge of childhood — but I also discerned, even then, that it was the tension of self-consciousness that blocked the grace he certainly possessed. Oddly, my father consented to take my brother and me bowling several times. Perhaps, though, this was a tolerable game for him. Bowling, after all, is among the most urban of sports: it’s played indoors; competitors are fully clothed in street attire; and they can tuck into entire meals during games. In those days, too, players like my father could enjoy a leisurely smoke between turns. Even the sport’s terms suggest the city — its “lanes” and “alleys” and “gutters.” And in the subterranean old place in the Village where we went, music blasted from a juke box and mingled with the endless, violent crashing of pins, creating the same shrill, frenetic atmosphere as the city outside. Yes, it was the sort of sport my father could endure — although, as always, he was awkward, and he threw mostly gutter balls, examining his bowling hand with diagnostic scrutiny. More surprising was his assault on tennis. He approached the game in the late 1970s, at his doctor’s insistence that he exercise. Sometimes he brought us to the courts, where we watched from the sidelines. 2ere were the predictable wild balls, the muttering and head shaking, the checking for injury, and quizzical, impatient stares from opponents across the net. But he was promptly forced into retirement by bursitis — one of the innumerable pains and illnesses

3@ T!" G#$% W!& N"'"$ C()" B(*+ (,- O.!"$ E//(0/ which plagued him throughout his life, particularly at times of stress or change. Today, my father’s old tennis racket resides in my closet, preserved by 5lial sentiment. With its warped, age-darkened wood and loose mesh, it reminds me of an Iroquois snowshoe. It had stood at the back of my father’s closet, unused for decades. Tennis was his last attempt to enter the Kingdom of Sport.

M+ 0%(,#$ %'/ .(#8;!(,#$ knew they appeared an unlikely couple — the dark, brainy, urban Jew and the fair, athletic, sunny-tempered Southern belle. True, Barbara enjoyed books, galleries, museums, and generally sought to expand her horizons, and my father could appreciate a zoo or a garden or even an artful double play or gymnastic leap on television; but they gave the impression of such opposite extremes that they might have been the person- i5cation of the duality of mind and body, of the Hebrew and the Hellenic. If my father had about him a bit of the rabbinical shtetl scholar, Barbara had something of the ancient pagan Greek athlete, worshipping the body and the sun. 2e attraction of opposites, at least super5cially, drew them together, each seeking wholeness by union with the other; but this inevitably stirred con4ict. 2e evening when I stood on Barbara’s skis occurred early in their courtship, and for some years afterward Barbara urged my father to try skiing. After they married, like many new wives, she harbored the private conviction that with her own special brand of love she could improve her 4awed

3A T,# G&$1 W,! N#"#$ C%;# B%7- husband. Over time, however, she grasped what she was up against, with ever-mounting wonder and frustration. Still, she was indefatigable in her campaign to get my father on the slopes. She alternately 4attered and scolded him. She spoke of former boyfriends who had skied with her. She urged him to consider his sons, who longed to ski. And then, to my astonishment, she con5ded to my brother and me with gleeful hugs that our father had agreed, if angrily and reluctantly, to go skiing. I could never, of course, imagine him on skis, whooshing down the mountain snows; and even when I actually saw him on skis, on the bunny slope, I wasn’t sure whether I was dreaming, the sight was so startling and unreal. He was so piteously uncomfortable on skis, on the snow, so hopelessly awkward and hesitant that it was distressing to watch. He had no ski out5t, naturally; he wore a long, fashionable suede coat and was bare-headed (in those days, few skiers wore helmets). Barbara coaxed him to slide the skis across the snow while he continued to lift each leg high with each step, trying to walk as though on a pavement, with a boy’s earnestly studious expression. And then he abruptly slipped and fell, injuring a 5nger — the “social 5nger,” appropriately enough — on his left hand. And that was the end of that. It had taken Barbara years of pleading and wily stratagems to get him onto that bunny slope, and it had ended after a few minutes in a tangle of my father’s skis and poles, and a rushing ski patrol. His baleful, over- the-shoulder stare at Barbara as he hobbled away, escorted by the patrol, remains indelible. Was I dreaming? No, my father mentioned the incident

3B T!" G#$% W!& N"'"$ C()" B(*+ (,- O.!"$ E//(0/ in his journal, on Saturday, February 5, 1972: “Barbara took me and the boys skiing, a virginal exercise for us. 2ey loved it. I fell, tore every ligament in the middle 5nger of my left hand, and go around with that “social 5nger” heavily bandaged in a splint. Lots of laughs for everyone but me.” (2e entry is followed by a blank space on the page, then an unrelated note: “Should write an essay some day on the artist vs. what his art becomes for others.”) So, Barbara had won the Battle of the Skis, though it was a Pyrrhic victory. My father would never again attempt to ski, and Barbara, that day, hadn’t skied at all before she had to tend to him in the ski-patrol hut. But her campaign, I later realized, had also been largely for the bene5t of me and my brother: for a short time that day, we 5nally did taste the exaltation of whooshing down the mountain snows, and I glimpsed the 4eeting image of her radiant face, her blonde hair peeking from under her wool hat, as she waved a gloved hand at us when we 4ew by. Probably it was reckless to allow novice boys to ski so freely, but she always scolded us with her smile, “fear is never fun!”

B%$*%$% ,%/ *1!C' &'(! !E$ 7&(+ 1&"#. like a fresh country breeze. If she hadn’t arrived, my brother’s and my visits with my father (on alternate weekends, according to the divorce arrangement with my mother) would have been spent almost entirely in various murky rooms around the Village. His apartment was curtained into a perpetual twilight, with 4oating veils of cigarette smoke. 2e place was masculine and spare, with a portable typewriter set on milk crates, an Army cot, and precarious towers of books

6D T,# G&$1 W,! N#"#$ C%;# B%7- and papers. My brother and I slept on a broken fold-out sofa he’d picked up somewhere. His idea of an entertaining jaunt for his sons was to equally dim and smoky Village cafés, where his graying, paunchy, bohemian friends swapped stories bristling with obscenities, salacious asides about the waitresses, and derisive remarks about former wives and French symbolist poets. Once in a while, he packed us into a taxi to a movie revival house to see a Chaplin or Marx Brothers 5lm, and then we sat in the smoking balcony, in yet another dark, airless room. Barbara’s arrival after their wedding instantly changed all that: the apartment’s curtains were parted, the windows were 4ung wide; the newly clear, sunlit air was suddenly perfumed by huge bouquets of 4owers which she tenderly arranged in big vases — Chinese Hibiscus, Heliconia, Spider Lilies. My father’s post-divorce bivouac became a woman’s home, su=used with sweet fragrance and light. Barbara also brought, along with her Prussian blue skis, an intriguing miscellany from her past: a wall mirror from Mexico with an ornate silver frame; a block of wood carved with totemic 5gures; a large pink-and-chocolate conch shell; a set of mother-of-pearl wind chimes the size of silver dollars which tinkled musically in the breezes by the now-open kitchen window overlooking Bleecker Street. 2ese alien objects seemed to appear overnight, dis- concertingly, amid my father’s familiar disorder. In the bathroom, her jewelry invaded the sink ledge — rings and bracelets of amber, jade, turquoise. Even before I was aware of her past, everything of Barbara’s conjured the sea, exotic fruit trees, island sun, alpine peaks. My father feigned indi=erence to the changes but his

63 T!" G#$% W!& N"'"$ C()" B(*+ (,- O.!"$ E//(0/ mood, like his apartment, noticeably brightened. Never- theless, I’m sure that he expected, in those early years, that his new wife would settle into her new life and leave him to work in peace. But just as Barbara misjudged the task of changing my father, he failed to appreciate how vital nature and sport had been to her since her privileged girlhood at one of the poshest boarding schools in the South.

A( (,# "#'#$%*1# M%/#&$% S7,!!1, in Virginia, Barbara (or Bobbi, as she was known) was team captain for 5eld hockey. She was also team captain for tennis, softball, and soccer. She was, in fact, one of the school’s two captains for all team sports for her grade. Later, at Vassar College, she performed in water ballet and synchronized-swimming exhibitions. As a girl, in Atlanta, she had charged through meadows on horseback, practiced dressage, and was something of a tomboy, running barefoot with her two brothers through the woods and streams behind their house, occasionally with their mother leading the way. A hearty love of sport and the outdoors 4owed through her clan as strongly as a devotion to books and the arts ran through my father’s family. Barbara’s father, Arthur Adams, was a dedicated 5sherman and golfer — despite debilitating leg wounds su=ered as a captain in World War I, in the trenches in France (his valor earned him a Purple Heart). Her mother, Eleanor, was also fond of golf and was an avid swimmer, equestrian, and gardener. 2ere is an arresting photograph of her wearing breeches and riding-boots, one leg poised triumphantly on the running board of a Buick

66 T,# G&$1 W,! N#"#$ C%;# B%7- convertible — a car as sleek and menacing as a torpedo — with her hands resting challengingly on her hips. She is both formidably regal and dashingly sporty. Barbara’s parents had impeccable social graces, lived well but without ostentation, were nominally Presbyterian: they 4oated easily among the highest social circles of Georgia, and later, Washington, where her mother was on the boards of charities and of the National Symphony. Arthur Adams mingled with leaders of the Republican Party. House guests, when Barbara was a girl, included State Department o9cials and o9cers from Annapolis. Her father saved personal letters from senators and generals and from the war-hero president Dwight D. Eisenhower, whom he greatly admired, and met several times; he and Eleanor danced at both of Eisenhower’s inaugural balls. I met Barbara’s parents only twice, when I was very young. Arthur Adams left the impression of a tall, 5t, silver- haired man with patrician, suntanned features, wearing an elegant dark suit. Her mother, too, was silver-haired and immaculately turned out. While Arthur Adams was a self-made man from Minnesota-Danish farming stock, Barbara’s mother traced her lineage to the Glorious Revolution in England, to French Huguenots, and to pre-Revolutionary America, and the grand old Phelps family — a giant oak of a family tree, its branches clustered and bowed with aFuent and eminent ancestors. Barbara was directly related to the Beecher and Ward families, which included Julia Ward Beecher, author of “2e Battle Hymn of the Republic”; Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin; and Henry Ward Beecher, the celebrity clergyman and abolitionist. Her family owned

6: T!" G#$% W!& N"'"$ C()" B(*+ (,- O.!"$ E//(0/ a desk that had belonged to the Revolutionary War hero Nathan Hale, said to be a distant relation. “I’m not sure you realize how thoroughly Barbara was reared to take her place in the highest circles of Society,” my father once scolded me, when I was a sullen teenager. I don’t remember the circumstances of that rebuke, but it was quite justi5ed: I would not realize until I was an adult how rari5ed her early life had been. My brother and I, living in downtown Manhattan with our mother and stepfather, hadn’t known anyone who was wealthy. My conception of the rich was born from television broadcasts of Depression-era Hollywood’s often cartoonish portrayals. Barbara’s occasional anecdotes about her southern girlhood lacked the magni5cence of the movies’ Old South — there were no columned plantations or ranks of gloved servants — and in our daily lives she wore no pearls or gowns, so I didn’t fully accept that she had come from wealth. Sometimes she mentioned, with a derisive twinkle in her eye and a put-on upper-crust accent, that such-and-such a school or club had been “vedy, vedy posh,” or “just wouldn’t do”; and she unconsciously used quaint upper-class words from her girlhood, which no one I knew ever used, like nifty and marvelous, and she once said that a school friend in Georgia had “piles of money, just oodles of it!” But somehow the simple fact of her family’s wealth didn’t penetrate my awareness. I was oblivious to her well-meaning attempts to educate me about how the wealthy lived in the real world rather than in movies, about subtler signs of modern American aFuence. Barbara told us, for instance, that she had attended Vassar and Madeira

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School, but I didn’t register her point that they were havens for daughters of Old Money. She mentioned that her family belonged to the Chevy Chase Club, but I didn’t catch that it was a pinnacle of country clubs, where presidents Wilson and Taft had golfed. I heard that her father was a top executive at a department-store chain named Gar5nckel’s, but missed that the store had been for decades a Washington institution, housed in a massive stone edi5ce. Certain details of Barbara’s life I found out only much later, such as that she went to the legendary Mrs. Shippen’s Dancing Class with other young scions of prominent Washington families, and that Georgia newspapers printed photos of her family stepping o= cruise ships and mingling at society events. Only two aspects of Barbara’s southern girlhood implied for me the old-fashioned Gone with the Wind sort of grandeur that I associated with Southern wealth. One was that she and her brothers were cared for by a white-jacketed, Black houseman, William, who, with his wife, Eunice, tended loyally to the family for nearly four decades; the second was that her debutante ball was held in the pala- tial Columbia Country Club and was written about in newspapers. She showed us a photograph of her taken that day. She’s wearing a bou=ant gown, and with her 5ne features and blonde hair, she looks royal and ethereal, like Cinderella herself. But while my brother and I heard about her privileged girlhood, we also picked up tantalizing bits about a part of her life after the debutante ball, when she rebelled and 4ed from all that.

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M%'+ +#%$. 1%(#$, B%$*%$% .%&/ that she was never quite sure what had driven her to kick over the traces. She speculated that her revolt might have been foretold by her tomboy streak; or she could have been living out her mother’s thwarted desire for adventure; or maybe her restlessness was her inheritance from the women of the Ward-Beecher-Stowe clans — all those intrepid New England abolitionists, reformers, and authors. Certainly, though, she was driven by a hunger for a di=erent sort of life. Just as Barbara had shared parts of her girlhood only through occasional breezy sketches, she similarly spoke of her revolt only blithely, in passing. Over many years, I pieced together her unlikely route from the Columbia Country Club and the bou=ant gown to my father’s tiny Village apartment. After college, she landed at Life magazine as secretary to the Washington bureau chief. Soon she was researching articles, mixing with the magazine’s renowned photogra- phers, accompanying them on assignments, and writing copy. She was among the press corps on the 4oor of the 1960 Democratic convention, in Los Angeles, when it nominated John F. Kennedy for president. Had Barbara stayed at the magazine, she probably would have followed her school friends into the clubby Washington society of the early sixties, as the wife of a journalist, diplomat, senator, or banker. She’d have mingled with the elite at Georgetown dinner parties thrown by grande dames such as Evangeline Bruce or Susan Mary Alsop. But at this prospect Barbara became “panicky, as though walls were closing in,” as she later phrased it. She had been “excruciatingly bored” on dates with Ivy

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League young men, whom she found “uptight and dull.” She re4ected: “I didn’t know it, but I was looking for an interesting life — with an interesting man.” And so, “hell- bent to escape,” she abruptly ran away from home, driving a Volkswagen Beetle across the country, to San Francisco. 2e city was in the midst of a new 4ourishing of the arts, and the North Beach section had gained notoriety as a center of the Beat movement. She dipped into the scene — browsed in the City Lights book shop, stopped in the jazz clubs, bars, co=ee houses. She got hired for an administrative position at a law 5rm and rented a studio in Paci5c Heights, a hilltop neighborhood of Victorian mansions, small parks, and re5ned pre-war apartment buildings famed for spectacular vistas of the Bay and the Golden Gate Bridge. But after six months, she was restless again. One evening, after work, she noticed the blue skis propped in the window of a little shop of bric-a-brac and curios, and impulsively bought them. 2en she set o= to Aspen. She drove with another young woman, Joan, a neighbor she’d met one morning on the stairs of her building. Joan was also an exile from a wealthy Southern family, dark-haired, adventurous, con5dent. At Aspen, they lived in the cottage which Barbara had told us about at her apartment, at the base of Ajax Mountain, and adopted the black wolf-hound. Days were spent riding primitive chair-lifts and plunging down powdery trails. Evenings, she and Joan waitressed at a jazz club. Aspen was only about a decade into its rebirth as a skiing mecca, and, as Barbara would tell us, it was still a rustic clutch of low brick buildings evocative of the silver-boom

6@ T!" G#$% W!& N"'"$ C()" B(*+ (,- O.!"$ E//(0/ days, with weeds pushing through the sidewalks. Ranchers stopped through for drinks at the Jerome Hotel, a Victorian vestige on East Main Street, and at that time the only hotel in town. I formed images of Barbara hurrying among tables carrying full serving trays, or whooshing down slopes in a Fair Isle sweater and baggy wool trousers, smiling for snapshots in cat-eye sunglasses. (In fact, these imaginings were not far from truth.) But after a year, restless once more, she and Joan drove south, intending to ski the Chilean Andes, camping along the way. 2eir plan changed at Acapulco, where a stroll through a yacht club resulted in an invitation to join the crew of a double-masted sailboat, aptly named the Escapade, on its return to California. 2at launched her on two years of crewing on sail boats as they laced through the Caribbean Sea. It was a period of sun, snorkeling, scuba diving, and romance, and exploring green islands not yet built up for tourism. She acquired, and grew to love, sailing skills — how to tack and jibe, how to tie a square knot or a clove hitch, how to read a map and compass, how to reef a sail in heavy weather. Her parents, meanwhile, were impatient with what they considered their golden girl’s larking about. 2ey expected her to come home to Washington, resume her old life, and marry. 2eir daughter never would quite come back.

I' &(. !E(1&'#, B%$*%$%’. #%$1+ 1&0# probably has a familiar ring; we’ve heard or read her story, or its variants, since childhood, in fairytales like “Rapunzel” or “2e Twelve Dancing Princesses,” in operas like #e Magic Flute, and

6A T,# G&$1 W,! N#"#$ C%;# B%7- in legends like that of Saint Barbara, the Christian martyr held captive by her rich pagan father. 2ese are, of course, branches of the Western folktale of the beautiful princess locked in a tower, of the “damsel in distress.” We also know Barbara’s story from Hollywood, which adopted the “runaway-heiress” plot for romantic comedy, launching the durable genre with the 1934 hit It Happened One Night, in which a spoiled but plucky young woman leaps from the family yacht and eventually 5nds both Love and the World by marrying her knight errant, a rakish but virtuous newspaper reporter. In Te s t Pi l o t (1938), Myrna Loy greets pilot Clark Gable, who lands his plane on her parents’ prosperous Kansas farm, with a half-sardonic nod to the old tale: “I know you — you’re the prince. A nice, charming prince, right out of the sky. A young girl’s dream. And I’ve been waiting for you all my life. 2at’s why no other man touched the tip of my 5nger. I’ve lived for a prince.” In such modern retellings, the princess has become the lonely farm girl and the sti4ed socialite; the imprisoning tower has become the farm-house bedroom, the yacht, the mansion, the arranged marriage to the leadenly proper 5ancé — all the soul-crushing con5nements that Society once imposed on young women to protect them, and their families, from scandal and fortune hunters. History has provided innumerable counterparts to such 5ctions, and none more compelling than the life of Lady Hester Stanhope. A niece of British Prime Minister William Pitt, she escaped the restrictions (and expenses) of aristocratic London at age thirty-three, in 1810, and for the rest of her life she imperiously roamed the Middle East attired as a Bedouin man. Riding her mounts in silks, sash,

6B T!" G#$% W!& N"'"$ C()" B(*+ (,- O.!"$ E//(0/ turban, breeches, and boots, she was famed in the Levant as “Queen Hester.” She died in 1839, alone, but free and without regrets, in an abandoned monastery in Lebanon, at age sixty-three. A very di=erent, and heartbreaking, story concerns the fate of another high-born woman, a beautiful young French socialite who failed to escape. In 1901, Blanche Monnier was sensationally rescued by police after she had endured twenty-5ve years locked in the sunless attic of a manor in the city of Poitiers, banished there by her mother to abort a romance with a lawyer deemed an unsuitable match. Somewhere between such extreme real-world incarnations of the legend is the more common plight of the wealthy young lady who does not quite seek to escape her gilded cage yet chafes at it, becoming an equivocal public 5gure, part rebel, part Society dame. She appears as dignitaries such as Princess Margaret and Teddy Roosevelt’s daughter Alice Roosevelt Longworth. Barbara’s escape, in its decisiveness, in its irrevocable swerve into bohemia, most resembles, to me, those determined 4ights to the Left Bank in the early twentieth century by certain wealthy young British and American women, such as Natalie Barney or the cruise ship heiress Nancy Cunard; or the rebellions of several notable daughters of mid-century Park Avenue — the photographer Diane Arbus, the 5lmmaker Shirley Clarke, and her sister, the writer Elaine Dundy. All were spirited and gifted young women in search of ful5llment in an artistic milieu. 2ere is also the intriguing story of the Manhattan heiress Dorothy Arnold. One afternoon, in December

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1910, Arnold literally vanished on the crowded corner at Fifth Avenue and Twenty-sixth Street, outside Brentano’s bookstore. She was never seen again. Her disappearance spawned headlines and sparked speculation of murder or an elopement. But there was also conjecture that she had purposely vanished, in a bid for independence. Arnold had wished to become a writer and had asked her father to set her up in an apartment in Greenwich Village. Her father had refused, and soon afterward, Dorothy Arnold was gone without a trace. Her fate is still unknown. Fifty years after her disappearance, the historian Allen Churchill recounted Arnold’s story in an article titled “2e Girl Who Never Came Back.” 2e title seems appropriate for all those strong-willed young women who have struck out from cloistered lives to forge new destinies, alone or with a knight errant. Eventually, Barbara, like Dorothy Arnold, looked toward Greenwich Village for salvation. In 1963, she arrived in Manhattan. She initially rented a street-level 4at on Riverside Drive. An employment agency sent her to the o9ces of Grove Press, in the Village, where for the rest of the decade she would publicize its avant-garde, censorship- busting books. At a time when New York’s middle-class women wore pillbox hats, wool suits, and white gloves, and rode taxis and buses, Barbara raced a motorcycle through Central Park and along Park Avenue, to and from her downtown o9ce. She later moved to the apartment where I 5rst saw her skis. Here, in the shabby-bohemian life of the Village, at de5ant little Grove Press, this Southern belle instantly felt at home. And then, one day at her o9ce, she met my

:3 T!" G#$% W!& N"'"$ C()" B(*+ (,- O.!"$ E//(0/ father, who was there to lunch with a writer friend. With his bohemianism, intellectual brilliance, and earthy humor, my father was, for her, something utterly new, all she had sought: an interesting man. Her parents were outraged by their daughter’s marriage — her betrothal to a divorced, Jewish, Greenwich Village writer with two young children “was not what they had in mind for me,” Barbara once said, in amused understatement. Although in time, Arthur Adams and my father warmed somewhat to each other, no thaw would occur in my father’s relations with her mother (whom he referred to as the “Ice Queen”). For years, Barbara’s parents quietly made it plain that they’d like nothing better than that she should 4ee this usurper — presumably Barbara would settle into her old bedroom as though no years had passed — and marry a proper gentleman. On rare occasions when my father and Barbara spent an evening with them, her parents displayed an exaggerated, rigid decorum, as though her husband wasn’t a bespectacled, graying intellectual, but a pirate who’d swept away their girl, kicking and screaming in petticoats, o= to sea, desecrated her virtue, and then boldly returned to despoil their parlor, with a sabre at his side and wearing an eye patch.

BE( &' ($E(,, &( C%. (,#&$ /%E),(#$, rather than her husband, who had a touch of the buccaneer about her, in her love of roving, of the sea and ships, and in her resolve to 5ght for what she wanted. And like the old privateers, she had found refuge among the Caribbean islands. In their

:6 T,# G&$1 W,! N#"#$ C%;# B%7- sheltered lagoons and pristine jungles lay her buried treasure: her free and careless 5rst youth on the sea. Barbara had accepted that she couldn’t go back to the Caribbean as a girl sailor, but she could as a wife and stepmother. And once she made up her mind, her will was inexorable. So began the Battle of Martinique, among the bitterest of my parents’ 5ghts. My brother and I 5rst became caught in the cross5re one weekend afternoon when I was about twelve and my brother, ten. My father had gone out brie4y, and we noticed that an array of travel brochures had appeared on the glass co=ee-table. 2ey unfolded a paradise of palm trees, white crescent beaches, emerald waters, sapphire skies. Barbara sat with us and whispered conspiratorially: “I’m trying to persuade your father to take us to Martinique!” She gestured to the brochures and squeezed our hands, and for a moment there were three children on the sofa all excited together. Barbara painted for us the island’s wild beauty — its giant tropical 4owers and 4ashing, violent storms, its rolling sugarcane 5elds in the hills, its starry night skies jeweled with constellations of gods and beasts. And she told us how she had been scuba diving o= the coast and chanced on a blue shark so near that she could have touched its nose with her 5ngers — and if we all went to the island, she would take us scuba diving, too. Scuba diving! Sharks! My brother and I solemnly vowed secrecy about her plan. But when my father came home, our eagerness overran our good intentions. He spun at Barbara: “Did you tell them we were going to Martinique?” His tone held such fury that it instantly hushed my brother and me.

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“I only said that I would like us to go and that I hoped I could persuade you,” Barbara replied, standing her ground. He led her to their bedroom in a single-5le march, like two generals entering a 5eld tent for negotiations. 2ere was silence. 2en their muFed voices rose to shouts; appalling curses were hurled. My brother and I exchanged apprehensive glances. I expected to hear smashed vases, screams, to see 4ames licking under the door. But the tempest abruptly subsided; the door slowly opened and my father re-emerged, alone. He was weirdly subdued; his eyes were haunted by a sort of crazed desperation, of a man trapped by destiny. I think at that instant he felt that Barbara had treacherously allied with his sons, like those twisted familial betrayals of Greek tragedy. 2e dreaded remote island, with all its sylvan nature, was fated. Nevertheless, my father would continue to thrash against the inevitable. He insisted that a trip to the Caribbean would mire him in debt (this was not true) and would interfere with his professional commitments. He accused Barbara of being sel5sh and stubborn. At last, he admitted candidly that he did not want to make the trip. He revealed that he had never learned to swim; he declared that he would “go crazy” lying for hours on a beach; he muttered that he would be badly sunburned despite lotions, which somehow wouldn’t protect his skin. My brother and I would witness several more clashes, and Barbara would later tell me there had also been “hor- rid” scenes where objects were indeed thrown. So she’d resumed 4ank attacks, ambush, and diplomacy, which had maneuvered my father onto the ski slopes after frontal attacks had been driven back. She would wait for him to be

:< T,# G&$1 W,! N#"#$ C%;# B%7- in a cheerful mood and then gently broach the trip again. “I was so quiet about it, he didn’t even know I was leading him into the subject,” she recalled. “And when he did get it, it was too late.” She emphasized to him how his boys would exult in such a trip. To overcome his aversion to the beach, she spoke of the rich history of the island, which included a stay by Gauguin before Tahiti, the birth there of Napoleon’s Josephine, and the tragic eruption, in 1902, of the volcano Mount Pelée — all of which would assure historical diversions beyond the shore. “I just kept after him, and kept after him,” Barbara laughed. “He began to weaken when I threatened that I would go alone or o=ered to take you boys. He got that I meant business. And I did.” When my brother and I gathered that we really would go to Martinique, we were as shocked as when we’d heard that my father had assented to go skiing. Barbara said to me: “I often would let your father get his way, but there were times when I had to tell him, ‘Now see here, I am going to do this or that, and so are you.’”

W# %$$&"#/ %( % C,&(#-C%.,#/, three-story inn with a red-tiled roof and wrought-iron balconies which overlooked Fort-de-France Bay. 2e overgrown grounds were home to extended families of tiny green lizards that went skittering wildly before you as you walked, and to hummingbirds that 4itted among enormous fragrant 4owers along the shaded patio, where we breakfasted. Each morning, the woman who ran the place served baskets of fresh bread, ramekins of butter and jam, pitchers of fruit juice, and tin pots of co=ee.

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2at week, we rented a stuttery Citroën and reconnoi- tered the island. We drove out through the cane 5elds; we lunched on fresh seafood in thatched-roof shacks by idyllic beaches; we strolled the capital, Fort-de-France, and the former capital, Saint-Pierre. Everything here seemed to me new and strange — the little European car we rode, the French language around us, the tropical jungles, the sudden daily rainstorms, the great birds soaring above the palm trees, the blinding sun and heat, the wretched rural poverty. But most days my brother and I spent at the crescent of the bay, building sandcastles, or splashing in the gentle surf among schools of small, translucent 5sh. Barbara swam with us, or dozed, or read a magazine contentedly on a beach chair, wearing large sunglasses and a straw hat, her long, slender limbs glistening with suntan oil. My father remained in the shade of the inn’s patio. 2ere, as at home, he scoured manuscripts and books which he’d brought, underlining texts with a pencil and jotting notes in page margins, inhaling cigarettes. Imaginary walls blocked the green fronds pressing in eagerly around him: while Barbara had brought nature to our apartment, he’d brought our apartment to the tropics. Toward the middle of each afternoon, though, he joined us brie4y at the beach. His appearance always cast a sudden shadow over our cheerful trio, like a black thunder cloud. He stood above us refusing, for unfathomable reasons, to sit on sand. For a few minutes, he would exchange pleasantries with us. 2en, with a resolute expression, he would shed his sandals and polo shirt, and walk tenderly on the hot sand to the waves and wade in until the water just reached his khaki shorts. He’d rub some water on his shoulders — as

:? T,# G&$1 W,! N#"#$ C%;# B%7- fair as a cherub’s — then he returned, grimly put on his shirt and sandals, and left for the patio, to work for the rest of the day. Why he forced himself to endure such ablutions I couldn’t understand. My brother and I, meanwhile, got sunburned, then brown like a couple of coconuts, and we dashed around in a state of giddy exhilaration from the sting of the sun and the waves, our hair sti= from salt water, our bathing trunks full of sand. We chased the lizards around the inn, trying to capture them in our hands. At night, we fell asleep instantly, dropped to the very bottom of consciousness, like two little 5sh sleeping on the 4oor of the ocean. 2e high point of the trip came toward the end, when Barbara ful5lled her promise that we would go scuba diving. (“You’ll love it — it’s just magical under the water!”) My father, of course, waited at the inn, correcting manuscripts. Our diving group comprised a handful of American and European tourists, led by two cheerful young men, a blond American and a Black islander. We sailed south along the coast, down to Diamond Rock, a diving site popular for its coral reef, abundance of 5sh, and ship- wrecks. We fastened our face-masks, dropped over the boat’s side, and glided down through darkening water, releasing columns of silver bubbles from our masks. With Barbara’s angular 5gure 4oating ahead through the blue, and waving us on, we neared a ghostly sunken freighter. Beneath the surface, the sea was, as she’d said, an aquatic fairy realm. Colorful 5sh passed with wide eyes; a fantastic, golden, spider-like creature danced on my open palm. Barbara pointed out an eel glaring at us from a small cave.

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In the evening, the sun 4ared red at the distant edge of a purple sea, a cool wind rose which whipped our hair, and the boat rumbled back toward shore. 2e two young men who ran the vessel sat on deck drinking Martinique rum from a bottle, with bandanas tied piratically around their heads. 2ey passed the rum among the little group and chatted about diving, and Barbara joined the conversation and startled me by tipping back the bottle when it reached her. She reclined easily against the boat’s side, and she seemed to enjoy the 4irtations of the two bandanaed, bare-chested sailors. She was languorous, contented, thoroughly in her element. Years earlier, I had glimpsed my father anew when we’d played an awkward game of catch in a playground; now, I saw Barbara as I never had: a blonde woman in a bikini, drinking and laughing with two sailors, and this woman happened to be our stepmother. I experienced again the vertiginous feeling that I had peeped over the hedge of childhood. I suddenly could visualize Barbara in a very di=erent life than ours in New York — maybe shacked up with an easygoing sailor here on the islands, or married to a yachtsman or polo player. But even more disquieting was that, at this moment, Barbara showed me that happiness could legitimately dwell in the cool evening winds, and in the blue depths of the sea, on the deck of a boat, and in rum and easy laughter. Her laughter in particular upset me, for it seemed a devastating betrayal of my father, a challenge to his entire con5ned, bookish, civilized existence. For despite my father’s often irksome and comic limitations, I admired his erudition and sophistication, his belief that the deepest ful5llment was had through the life of the mind.

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2at evening on the little boat rumbling back to shore, my loyalties were irrevocably torn. Over the years, as on that evening, it would strike me that Barbara must have often felt oppressed by my father, though she clearly loved and admired him and shared much of his ravenous curiosity. After he died, she didn’t remarry — no one could replace him for her — but she did begin to live as though she’d been newly released. In her seventies, still slim and energetic, she went for brisk walks through Central Park and for drives in the country. She talked of buying a bicycle, of going sailing again. In any case, I certainly often felt oppressed by my father. While we were scuba diving, the image of him laboring over manuscripts at the inn returned to me. He was like the eel glaring from its cave, and I resented him — why couldn’t he simply join us in the water?

I' (,# +#%$. *#0!$# %'/ %0(#$ !E$ ($&8 to Martinique, my father and stepmother fought many lesser engagements, which Barbara sometimes won. 2ere was the Battle of the Hudson, by which she compelled my father to join her on a sightseeing ship on the Hudson River (he spent the day bent over the rail). And there was the Battle of Massachusetts, which ended with a Sunday drive through the state’s backroads (although she failed to persuade him to leave the car with her to pet a cow at a fence). However, my father also frequently kept his colors de5antly 4ying. She failed to get him on the ice when they were invited to a skating party at a country pond; nor would she get him on a bicycle, nor on a golf course with her father. She also

:B T!" G#$% W!& N"'"$ C()" B(*+ (,- O.!"$ E//(0/ unsuccessfully tried to get him to bring his boys 5shing, to rent a country house in Pennsylvania for a week, and to take a day-hike in upstate New York. But these were not true defeats for Barbara, merely tactical withdrawals in minor contests; she chose to keep her powder dry for larger battles. 2eir con4icts sometimes broke out shortly before my brother and I knocked on their door on Saturdays. 2en, we entered a hastily abandoned battle5eld — a lingering sulfurous atmosphere of wary glances and tight-lipped silences, of barely constrained fury. Once in a while, Barbara deliberately provoked my father by divulging to us, in front of him, some enticing plan she’d had for the day which he had blocked: “I wanted to bring you boys to the zoo in Central Park, but your father said ‘No.’” 2en there would be a sharp 4ashing of eyes or, if things were particularly tense, a single-5le walk to the bedroom. But every couple of months, we would 5nd a quite di=erent atmosphere: a strange calm pervaded the apartment. My father would be slumped in his favorite chair with an especially hopeless, besieged expression, and the manuscript-page he held was like a white 4ag of surrender. On those days we knew, with a concealed delight, that Barbara had decided it was time for us to have a lesson at Claremont Riding Academy. She had discovered Claremont when she 5rst came to New York, and now she wanted her two city boys to know the glory of charging away on horseback, as she had known it as a girl racing across the Georgia meadows. Claremont was not remotely a Georgia meadow, but it immediately became, for my brother and me, a pastoral

<3 T!" G#$% W!& N"'"$ C()" B(*+ (,- O.!"$ E//(0/ you passed through the great rustic archway, you left behind the modern, rushing city and entered the archaic realm of Epona, of the riding ring, with its scents of hay and dirt and old leather, the calls of instructors to circling riders, the incessant hollow clop-clop of mounts being led up and down the stables’ wooden ramps. You saw riders adjusting saddles and stirrups, or standing with their riding crops held between their knees while putting on gloves. Among those circling the ring were boys and girls, no older than I was, but attired in breeches, tall leather boots, and derby-like black velvet helmets. Sometimes, as we approached from the street, a group of riders would burst from the archway’s gloom in full regalia, bound for Central Park, glorious as a royal procession. Our lessons at Claremont weren’t fairground pony rides but serious business; the instructors, brandishing riding crops, were exacting about proper form. 2ey’d stand in the center of the ring and scold their circling pupils: “heels down!” or “sit straight!” At the start of a lesson, the instructor would give you a boost onto the saddle, and suddenly you sat, perched perilously aloft, with, beneath you, between your tiny knees, the great, breathing, warm, alertly waiting beast with twitching ears. 2e instructor would inspect how you sat and held the reins, issue corrections, and send you to join the others moving counterclockwise around the posts of the ring. 2ere, you were drilled on how to control your mount. We learned how a tap from our heels would move us leisurely forward, but too hard a tap could send us careening wildly; how a tug on the reins would slow or turn us, but too hard a tug could bring us to a rearing,

<6 T,# G&$1 W,! N#"#$ C%;# B%7- stamping halt. We learned to ride English saddle: how to post, to shift smoothly from trot to canter to gallop. We naturally loved to gallop — we’d 4y around and around until the ring became a dizzying blur of instructors and riders, a thrilling, dreamlike carousel. And Barbara would be standing among the instructors, waving at us and smiling, sharing our elation. Barbara seldom indulged in a lesson for herself, though when she did, she displayed 4awless form. But she’d usually forego this pleasure to spare my father an added cost, and this must have been a painful sacri5ce. After lessons, we witnessed Barbara’s intimate rapport with horses. Horses loved her, nuzzled her like an old friend. She 5nagled for us visits to the stables — long dark rows of stalls hung with tack, the air thick with earthy scents, the silence punctuated by distant whinnies and snorts. She would show us how to stroke the horses’ muzzles so they wouldn’t nip at our 5ngers with their huge yellow teeth, and she’d let us feed them sugar cubes from our 4at palms, their searching lips tickling delightfully. We always had lunch at a nearby restaurant, which was similar in atmosphere to the stables: high-ceilinged, cool, and full of wood, with weak, watery light drifting in through distant windows. Sitting at one of the high- backed, wooden booths, we’d order eggs and pancakes, which arrived on heavy, antique porcelain plates, and we’d talk horses with Barbara. “You were impressive, both of you,” she would say, or something similar which swelled us with pride. “You’re beginning to control the horse like real equestrians.” Her encouragement was a balm we badly needed — she knew

<: T!" G#$% W!& N"'"$ C()" B(*+ (,- O.!"$ E//(0/ this — because our father withheld praise. We were always striving to impress him and failing. Barbara was always 5guratively dusting us o= and urging us to try again. “2e instructor was telling me how well you both can cantor now. But I saw that you tended to slouch — you have to keep tall in the saddle,” and she’d demonstrate by sitting up tall in the restaurant booth and raising her chin, then breaking into a twinkly smile. Her criticism was always gentle, and she refrained from burdening us, as she had been burdened at school, with lectures about the value of sport for forging “character.” She gave us only the beauty of nature, the exaltation of whooshing down the slopes, the wonder of diving into the sea, the elation of riding a galloping horse.

B%$*%$%’. 1!"# !0 ,!$.#. kept her near our small black- and-white television during the great annual races — the Kentucky Derby, Belmont Stakes, and Preakness Stakes — and my brother and I watched with her. She regularly read the racing news in the New York Times and followed the champion racehorses of those years, such as Secretariat and Seattle Slew, and the famed jockeys — Steve Cauthen, Angel Cordero, Jr., Willie Shoemaker. Still, she never went to the races — it was too much of a bother, she said — but she wanted to take my brother and me, and so we went. It was a sweltering Saturday in May of 1977; it turned out to be a memorable afternoon. Early in the morning, we boarded the Long Island Railroad at Penn Station, along with a silent crowd that seemed to be composed entirely of old working-class men.

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2ey all appeared weirdly alike: weathered faces, eyeglasses, narrow-brimmed summer hats, short-sleeved shirts. During the trip, they thoughtfully marked racing forms with pencils. 2e train let us out at Belmont Park, near the grandstand, which was shaded and cool, and we beheld the track in the open sun, looping distantly around the lush grass of the in5eld. We spent the day in the stands or on the benches outside. Our handicapping, for our two-dollar wagers, was straightforward: we bet on either the horses carrying the longest odds and therefore o=ering the biggest bonanzas, or we bet on horses bearing the most inspiring names. But our approach to handicapping proved a failure; we lost money all day. Lunch consisted of seared, oily hot dogs in buns, served in small cardboard baskets on nests of glistening French fries, and icy lemonade in paper cups with straws. We went to the famous Belmont paddock, with the spreading pine tree at its center, where we watched the horses being led in circles before the crowds. 2ere was a sunny pageantry about all of this, this sport of kings: the sleek, magni5cent racehorses; the jockeys clothed in colorful silks; the regal Call to the Post bugled across the blue sky before each race; the clang of the gates as they sprang open, and then the thundering hooves and the rising crescendo in the grandstand as the horses surged toward the 5nish line. Finally came the weary end of the afternoon, the last race. 2e grandstand was emptying; the 4oors and stairs were littered with tickets, newspapers, paper cups. As we sat amid this desolation studying our racing forms, we were joined on our bench by an elderly lady. She wore a gauzy

<> T!" G#$% W!& N"'"$ C()" B(*+ (,- O.!"$ E//(0/ white dress and a broad white straw hat over what appeared a black wig; her cheeks were garishly rouged, her lips were ill-de5ned red smears. She exuded a combination of stagey, old-fashioned elegance and dingy eccentricity. She was at the track alone. When she sat with us, I feared she would ask for betting money or launch into a rambling monologue. As it turned out, she was perfectly pleasant. She had seen us, taken a shine to my brother and me, and decided to give us a tip on the horses. She explained that the last race allowed for trifecta wagers, an exotic bet which requires selecting not only the 5rst three horses to 5nish, but their exact sequence — a triumph of equestrian prediction which usually rewards success with large payo=s. 2e three horses to put money on, she said, pointing with the tip of a pencil at her racing form, were Judge Power, Little Miracle, and River Runner — numbers 6,5,1 — to win, place, and show. She glanced at each of us in turn to see that we fully understood, but seemed doubtful. She was emphatic that we take down her information precisely, and she made us repeat it. How did she know? A cryptic smile. And o= she shuf- 4ed in her long white dress, straw hat, and worn-down, chalked-white shoes. We were left baFed by this white apparition from the nineteenth century. After a conference, we agreed that we might as well bet as we’d been advised. And then we were standing at the rail and watching as the three front-running horses pounded past the 5nish line, their silks, emblazoned with the numbers 6,5,1, 4apping by in the precise sequence predicted by the Lady in White. We gazed at one another in disbelief, Barbara’s hands clenching ours, until we saw the

BE( (,#', (,#$# C%. .! ;E7, that we didn’t know. If we didn’t know our good fortune in having Barbara enter our

<@ T!" G#$% W!& N"'"$ C()" B(*+ (,- O.!"$ E//(0/ lives, we also didn’t truly know our father. Only in the years since his death have I become acquainted with this troubled, complex man, through reading his multi-volume journals. He had intended that I do so. Hours before his death, breathing faintly through an oxygen mask on his living room sofa — the same sofa where my brother and I had once spread out the brochures of Martinique — he 5rmly rejected my suggestion that I destroy them; in a dying murmur he gave his blessing: “Read them.” And so I have, gratefully — yet also, often, with some reluctance. 2e journals have opened a labyrinthine interior life which my father had largely kept secret from his family. Reading their pages I feel as though I’ve entered an Egyptian burial tomb with a head-lamp; his words are like hieroglyphics, leading me deeper and deeper within. I read on, apprehensive yet fascinated by the insights they hold about my father — among them, those concerning his peculiar, tortured relationship with sport and nature, which had puzzled me for so long. From his late adolescence, in the mid-1950s, through middle-age, in the early 1990s, my father tirelessly recorded both his intellectual preoccupations and his often harrowing emotional states. At age thirty, su=ering from anxiety and depression, and facing a likely split with my mother, he began intensive psychotherapy. From this period — the mid-sixties — onward, psychological speculation, and terms such as trans- ference, projection, and Oedipal complex, overrun much of the journal. He began a separate “Dream Journal,” in which he followed his mind’s night wanderings wherever they led, which was often to quite disturbing regions for him — and

Greed dominates my life, to 5ll the aching void. Greed for love, achievement, money. [October 1965]

My mind is often used as a cutting tool to dissect people, a way to control and dominate them. [July 1968]

Weeks, perhaps months, of living under a gray cloud. I feel it lifting a bit tonight as I think of my lack of self-acceptance. It is my habitual inner state to be always trying, setting up rigid goals that I must fail to live up to. 2us I create a continual unhappiness, dysphoria. [March 1970]

I realized a while ago that my childhood phobias were a way of tying myself to a household that o=ered too little security and love; I refused to go out in the street so hurt, so lacking, still hoping to hold things together and get what I wanted. [November 1971]

I live in a cell on whose wall I have painted devils. I converse with them, and they with me. Were I mad, we would howl at each other in rage and terror. [May 1978]

Each of these entries continues for several pages, bur- rowing ever deeper into intimate memories, dreams, and emotions, into psychological theory.

My father’s psychic wounds ultimately impaired his body; they created a paralyzing self-consciousness, robbed him, from early boyhood on, of the basic human enjoyments of physical games, of free exertion, of competition, of wild nature. Yet, as unfortunate as this was, I learned that it was only a small piece of his troubles. A cliché about psychiatry is that it inevitably identi5es one’s mother as the fount of psychic ills; in my father’s case, I’m convinced, as he was from early in therapy, that this was largely true. His mother, whom I knew from our visits to her Philadelphia home when I was growing up, was bookish and cultured, with an admirably incisive mind; but she also seemed to me, as she had to my father, a humorless, judgmental, frightened woman. Toward the end of her life, she became a near shut-in, reading books late into the night, afraid of all that was beyond her front door. (2e photo of Barbara’s mother, fearless in her breeches and riding boots by the sleek Buick convertible, could not present a more striking contrast.) My father concluded that she had infected him with her terrors and had demanded impossible intellectual achievement to earn her approval (“I tried to 5ght for recognition as a child by being special,” he wrote in June 1970). His father, a book wholesaler, was not a robust enough presence at home to counter her in4uence. In one journal passage, written at age 5fty, my father described seeing a 5lm in which a boy 4ails to stay a4oat in a river, which prompted memories of his boyhood summers at the shore in Atlantic City:

2is makes me think back to my mother’s warnings about being in the water in Atlantic City, warnings about tides and undertows. I expected to drown, which

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is what she said could happen. I learned all her visions of death — being sucked into the water and drowning, falling from high places and being smashed. 2e details of physical destruction were always implied, but very powerful. I also learned her visions of sadness, loneliness, anxiety, insomnia; ultimately, these were visions of solitary grief and madness. Beneath all this was her unexpressed rage. If she was afraid of rage, madness, and bloody death, why shouldn’t I be similarly afraid? I ended up entering my mother’s world.

My father spent much of his adult life struggling to disentangle himself from his mother’s world; it proved far more di9cult than Barbara’s escape by car from her girlhood home; his mother’s fears and demands proved insidious. In his nightmares, the perils of drowning — in oceans, in rivers, in swimming pools, in fountains — recur through the decades. As my father well understood, water has long been not only a literal source of terror — for shipwreck, for storm, for 4ood — but also a symbol of the terrors of the unconscious mind, sharing its mysterious, opaque depths. Freud stated, “2e poets and philosophers before me discovered the unconscious; what I discovered was the scienti5c method by which the unconscious can be studied.” Freud spoke the truth. Clearly, Shakespeare knew of our secret motives, showing us Lady Macbeth obsessively washing her hands while sleepwalking after the murder of King Duncan. In 1851 — nearly a half-century before Freud’s landmark book “2e Interpretation of Dreams,” and more than eighty years before Carl Jung elucidated his pioneering theory of the collective unconscious and of water as an archetypal symbol of the subterranean mind — Herman

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Melville vividly portrayed the sea as embodying the hidden self, in Moby Dick:

consider them both, the sea and the land; and do you not 5nd a strange analogy to something in yourself? For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half known life. Go keep thee! Push not o= from that isle, thou canst never return!

I sensed even when very young that my father was as frightened by that inner “appalling ocean” as of any real ocean. Melville, earlier in the same passage, wrote:

Consider the subtleness of the sea; how its most dreaded creatures glide under water, unapparent for the most part, and treacherously hidden beneath the loveliest tints of azure.

My father well knew the monsters beneath the mind’s surface. I was reminded, while reading his journals, of how we would be engaged in some banal conversation, maybe about my school work, or where we would go for lunch, when his expression would suddenly become abstracted, and apprehension would cloud his eyes. And I gleaned, if only vaguely, that something terrible was emerging from that sea within. An image returns to me from Homer’s #e Odyssey, of Ulysses sailing through the narrow Strait of Messina, navigating between the sea monster Scylla, with her six ferocious heads, and Charybdis, with her vast sucking

>6 T,# G&$1 W,! N#"#$ C%;# B%7- whirlpools. Ulysses tells of how Scylla attacked his ship and seized his crew:

they writhed, gasping as Scylla swung them up her cli= and there at her cavern’s mouth she bolted them down raw — screaming out, 4inging their arms toward me, lost in that mortal struggle...

It is a horrifying, bloody, watery scene, which calls up my father’s internal mortal struggles, his suppressed panics. During my brother’s and my weekends with him, I now know, he was often entering, alone, some inner Strait of Messina, facing his own Scylla and Charybdis, with sailors being seized around him, even while he tried to conceal it when speaking with us. In the twentieth century, Homer’s epic of the Greek hero’s wanderings after the Trojan War toward his home in Ithaca and his long-su=ering wife, Penelope, has been cast as an analogy to our inward journeys. For Jung, Ulysses’ passage through Hades, his “night sea journey,” as he termed it, was a tale of the therapeutic descent through the mind. For James Joyce, Ulysses’ travails signi5ed those we all face in our daily life. His 1922 novel, Ulysses, re-casts the epic within the mind of a middle-class Jewish ad canvasser, Leopold Bloom, as he navigates the hazards of Dublin on a June day in 1904, before returning home to his wife, Molly Bloom. By bringing the ancient tale into our modern, quotidian life, of newspapers and trams and bars, Joyce both elevates Bloom to heroic stature and lowers him to the level of mock-heroic. And in this 5ctional, middle-aged, urban

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Jew I recognize my father. He contained, like Bloom, an uncommon blend of absurdity, indomitableness, intel- ligence, curiosity, courage, and humor. 2ese qualities allowed him to prevail in a journey which led, over three long decades, to encounters with his own sirens, deadly giants, and angry gods, and with an oracle in the form of a white-haired, Viennese psychoanalyst. When I picture my father working at his manuscripts on that patio at Martinique, I think he must have felt stranded on Calypso’s island, imprisoned by a sea ruled by a vengeful Poseidon. When he marched with grim resolution across the sand each day to wade just a few steps into the sunlit waters amid the laughing, splashing bathers, it was to him the same deadly, dark sea of his nightmares since boyhood. His march into the surf appears, yes, absurd, but also a brave, private gesture — even, in a small way, truly heroic. Similarly, his e=orts to ski, or to play catch, or to bowl, or to play tennis, have been transformed for me since reading his journal, have become admirable confrontations with his devils, in which he risked not only inner pain but also humiliation before his sons and wife: I learned that he had not been oblivious, as I’d thought, to the stares he’d drawn when we’d played catch in that Village playground, nor had he been unaware of my morti5cation. But he’d kept playing until I was tired and asked to go home. As I’ve explored my father’s journals, I’ve also seen his marriage transformed. Barbara was no Molly Bloom or Penelope, waiting for her husband to return from his odyssey, but she was not quite traveling beside him. My father kept his journals, which is to say, his truest self, private, even from her. She was, in this aspect of their marriage,

>< T,# G&$1 W,! N#"#$ C%;# B%7- perhaps more a guide, as Athena was for Ulysses. Much of her insistence that he experience nature was driven not only by a quite legitimate urge for her own self-ful5llment, or to bene5t me and my brother, but also from a compassionate determination to lead this troubled man upward from his mother’s world out to freedom and light. 2eir marriage remains for me something of a melding, if a fraught one, of Body and Mind; but it’s no longer simply a joining of opposites. 2ey shared one key quality I hadn’t perceived: they were both athletes — she of the body, he of the intellect. He had trained his mind as competitively as an athlete trains the body. 2ey were attracted to the excellence they shared in their respective arenas. Such similarity of spirit had led Athena to come to the aid of Ulysses. My father, to his credit, did grasp how Barbara’s subtle balance of empathy and challenge had allowed him to grow, once concluding a journal entry simply: “Barbara brings out the best in me.” With Barbara’s guidance, my father did 5nally reach the far side of his Strait of Messina, and even arrived at the shore of his own Ithaca. In his journal, in June 1970, he wrote:

I am a prisoner of the past. What do I want now? To stand up straight, free of buried frustration, anger, and guilt. To love and be loved. To work with dignity and pleasure. To smile. To walk straight and 5rm and easy. Not to be my mother or father.

He largely achieved this most modest yet ambitious of goals. In his sixties, he made a last great change to his life: he relinquished writing and editing as a profession and turned

>> T!" G#$% W!& N"'"$ C()" B(*+ (,- O.!"$ E//(0/ to help others navigate their own straits of massina, to 5nd their own Ithacas. He went back to school, received a PhD, and became a psychoanalyst. And I gather he was a valued guide to many of his patients. Early during this period, after almost four decades of keeping a journal, my father abruptly closed it forever. One morning he woke from a dream with an intuition that he was on the edge of a profound illumination about his boyhood and his family. After 5ve pages of intense writing, he jotted at the bottom of the page, “Finis.” He had no more need of the journal, begun when he was 5fteen years old. When my father completed his studies he predictably fell ill, this time with pneumonia. After he had mostly recuperated, Barbara thought they needed a holiday. She chose as their destination the tiny Dutch island of Curacao, in the Caribbean Sea, o= the coast of Venezuela. As she had twenty years earlier, when she campaigned to go to Martinique, she chose an island with an intriguing history, and with diversions beyond the beach. She again gathered brochures and books for him. Curacao did indeed have an intriguing history. Since the Dutch arrived in their ships in the seventeenth century, the island had been a center for trade, of both goods and of slaves, a home for both privateers and for an unlikely community of Sephardic Jews. 2ere were tales that sailors, rotted with scurvy, were left there to heal by eating the fruit of the island, which became renowned for its curative powers. Barbara expected a 5ght, but my father, this time, did not protest: he was nearly prostrate from other battles —

>? T,# G&$1 W,! N#"#$ C%;# B%7- from obstacles to launching a new career, from his stubborn old demons, and from lingering illness. He went obediently. Although at Curacao he still did not swim but merely waded into the water, my father was now content to simply sit on the beach and watch the sea and the birds, as he could not, decades earlier, in Martinique. He often dozed on a beach-chair beside Barbara, resting and recuperating. 2ere is something lovely and faintly Homeric about the scene as I envision it: the battle-weary, gray-haired man asleep on the beach after being led there through the clouds. And it is 5tting that the name of this small place, where sailors once cheated death by eating from its enchanted fruit trees, means the Island of Healing.

2015

>@ Haunted Homeland Coming to terms with a Transylvanian heritage

y family comes from Transylvania. M When I occasionally happen to share this fact in conversation, I notice a change enters people’s eyes — they light up with a sort of intrigued amusement. And then I know that their minds have conjured Hollywood’s iconic images of that region — wooded peaks, ruined castles,

>A H%E'(#/ H!;#1%'/ vampires, perhaps a peasant mob armed with pitchforks and 4aming torches pursuing a 5end through a derelict, fog-wreathed graveyard. When I recognize this singular stare, I hasten to assure that my family is not among the undead, so far as I know, nor have we pursued them with farm implements. Such absurd disavowals can seem necessary because to remark that one’s kin hail from Transylvania has quite a di=erent e=ect than saying they once dwelled in, say, England’s Newcastle, or Germany’s Ruhr Valley, or some other European region whose associations for Americans, if any, are more prosaic. For as everyone knows, the swath of northern Romania that comprises Transylvania is the world capital for phantoms, particularly vampires, in popular culture. 2ere are other Transylvanias — a town in Louisiana, a county in North Carolina, a university in Kentucky — but there is only one Transylvania notorious worldwide. It has appeared for centuries on maps of southern Europe — a forested, mountainous area about the size of Ohio, with a population today of seven million — yet it’s also as mythical as the kingdom of Prester John. All the more so for Americans, because most of us haven’t visited the region or knowingly met a Transylvanian. Such an encounter would probably seem as though one were shaking hands with a fugitive from the pages of a Gothic novel or from a horror 5lm. I suppose that when I disclose my family’s origins, I am momentarily that fugitive to others. I should admit here that I have not yet visited my haunted ancestral homeland, and, moreover, that my Transylvanian heritage is con5ned to my mother’s maternal

>B T!" G#$% W!& N"'"$ C()" B(*+ (,- O.!"$ E//(0/ line. Additionally, my mother’s clan left Transylvania over a century ago, in the 5rst decade of the twentieth century, when they boarded the Orient Express at Bucharest for Paris. So, my bond with this faraway, fabled land — this “Land Beyond the Forest,” as Transylvania has been known since the Middle Ages — might seem attenuated. However, it has claimed a signi5cant portion of my identity. I might even say, only half-jokingly, that it has haunted me from boyhood.

W,#' I C%. % 7,&1/, my mother told me with evident enjoyment that our family’s home had been just a “stone’s throw” from Dracula’s castle. She might have been referring to the 5ctional Transylvanian ghoul or to the historical Vlad Dracula, the cruel, 5fteenth-century ruler of Transylvania’s neighboring province of Wallachia, who is said to have been an inspiration for Bram Stoker’s celebrated Count. But she probably had both in mind. And it’s true that our tribe was settled in the Carpathian Mountains when Stoker’s novel Dracula was published, in England, in 1897, and perhaps even in the time of Vlad Dracula. Nevertheless, our home would have been, at best, a 5gurative rather than literal stone’s throw from the castle of either. 2e stronghold of Stoker’s vampire is imagined near Tihuţa Pass, in northern Transylvania; the ruins of Vlad Dracula’s Poenari Castle stand today near the town of Arefu, in the southern Carpathians. Both castles are several hours’ drive from the city of Bacău. In the late nineteenth century, Bacău was a pro- vincial outpost of fewer than 20,000, far smaller than Bucharest; but it was a substantial commercial hub on

?D H%E'(#/ H!;#1%'/ the Bistriţa River, a junction for several railroads and a site for paper mills. Nearly half the population was comprised of Jewish tradespeople and merchants. Our family made brushes — for paint, for whitewash, for clothing. 2ey bought the animal bristles from peasants, crafted the brushes in a workshop, and peddled them from a wagon. Our earliest ancestor to emerge from the Transylvanian mists is my mother’s great-grandmother Gittel. A matriarch, she had a half-dozen children, among them my mother’s grandmother Frima. Gittel — the name means “good” in Yiddish — died about 1902, shortly before her family began to leave Romania for Paris. But from my earliest memory a hair- raising photograph of Gittel hung high in the living room of my mother’s apartment on New York’s Lower East Side. In the picture, which I still have, she is sitting in a photographer’s studio in Bacău, wearing a long, hooded black cloak, which conceals all but her ghostly white hands and face, as though she were captured in the act of vanishing. 2e cloak, a sort of chador, might merely have been the common garb of an Orthodox Jewish woman in the Carpathian Mountains, but it lent her a spectral appearance — the Grim Reaper’s mother, a Transylvanian spook. Year after year, I warily eyed this chilling apparition in our living room, this hooded shade who stared 4atly back at me from 2e Land Beyond the Forest. I always expected that the studio backdrop, a textile pattern, would reveal, if I examined it long enough, some encoded message from the undead. We also had several relics from the Old Country. Two sat

?3 T!" G#$% W!& N"'"$ C()" B(*+ (,- O.!"$ E//(0/ on a shelf not far from the photograph of Gittel: her brass mortar and pestle, and a handmade, wooden chess board. 2e mortar, which had two odd, pointed handles, and its heavy pestle, glowed like old gold, evoked a land distant and mysterious. Gittel had used them, my mother said, to grind ingredients for her remedy for cataracts, which had gained local renown (this brew no doubt needed claw of bat and eye of snake). 2e chess board was splintered and cracked by age; the chessmen had long ago been lost, or perhaps had 4ed in the night. 2e board was curiously small, and it could be folded for travel on loose, rusted hinges, and fastened with a rusted latch. I marveled at those hinges and that latch, which were so miniature and exquisite they could only have been made by elves in an enchanted Carpathian grotto. But, no, the board had been fashioned by Gittel’s son Tully, who was a chess prodigy (he would die of illness six months after arriving in Paris, leaving a widow and two children). A third relic hung on the wall near our front door, beside a framed, antique street map of Paris. It was a long-necked musical instrument, a strange mongrel of zither and man- dolin, hewn of dark, rich wood from a Transylvanian tree. It bristled with a ludicrous abundance of strings and tuning knobs, as though built by a monomaniac, and every inch was adorned with carvings that strangely echoed the textile pattern behind Gittel in her photograph. But the instrument was stubbornly mute — the strings were too heavy, densely packed, and taut to strum or pluck. No doubt a Carpathian incantation was needed, and then it would play furiously all by itself, emitting wild and unearthly folk songs. 2ese objects had always been part of my awareness

?6 H%E'(#/ H!;#1%'/ of our apartment. Just as black-cloaked, ghostly Gittel had always stared down from our wall, framed forever in nineteenth-century Transylvania, so there had always been on our shelves her mortar and pestle for potions, and a chessboard made by elves, and beside our door a bewitched stringed instrument. And I’d always known our family had brought these relics to America from our haunted homeland. Many boys would have thought it was cool to have a family that hailed from the global headquarters of the undead, but I found it shameful — none of my schoolmates’ apartments were cluttered with such weird Old World remnants, or with photographs of chilling crones. I saw in my imagination an oppressive tableau: our family sitting in the dirt yard of a wretched white-washed hovel, in the shadow of Dracula’s castle, with the men — dull-faced peasants with great mustaches — carving brushes, playing chess, and making music with peculiar stringed instruments to pass the hours, while Gittel 4oated by in her black cloak, grinding potions with her mortar and pestle, surrounded by evil spirits.

M+ ;!(,#$ /#1&),(#/ in our Transylvanian heritage, to my exasperation. She relished the campy horror of Hollywood’s Dracula 5lms, and her favorite costume at the occasional masquerade was that of a Romanian “Gypsy,” as the Roma people were then generally known in the United States — the free- spirited, mystical wanderer of legend, with tarot cards and crystal ball. She would don bangles, sash, and peasant dress,

?: T!" G#$% W!& N"'"$ C()" B(*+ (,- O.!"$ E//(0/ and tie a kerchief over her thick, dark hair: the costume was not so much a concealment as a revelation, a release of part of herself. In suburban Cleveland in the 1950s, my teenaged mother smiled obligingly for snapshots on lawns and in chintz-5lled living rooms, wearing the era’s innocuous high-school-girl out5ts of pu=y skirts or dungarees with loafers or saddle shoes. But she secretly lived within tem- pestuous, Gothic European romances of the nineteenth century, with dark stone manors, and forbidden love, and pursuits on horseback over moonlit moors. Her favorite novel was Wuthering Heights — she dreamed of a grand passion, of being swept away, like Emily Brontë’s heroine, Catherine Earnshaw, by her own Heathcli=. She had a strong theatrical bent and acted in college Shakespeare productions; and though she became a writer, she would have been perfectly at home as a teenager among a merry troupe of medieval strolling players. By the time she had children, in her late twenties, my mother had shed the romantic excesses of adolescence; but her belief in the magical, the supernatural, only deepened with the years. I remember her days when I was growing up as hectic, keeping house for her children and my stepfather. But she was cheerful and darkly beautiful, full of song. In our kitchen she listened to records of folk music, Roma music, Greek music, swaying to the rhythms or singing softly while chopping vegetables or scrubbing a pot. Occasionally, she’d invite a neighbor for co=ee and cookies, and the women would chat and the air would cloud from their cigarettes; or she indulged in long phone calls with college friends, smoking and laughing.

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She tried each day to carve out an hour to write. She penned plays and stories, all su=used with the paranor- mal, with motifs from fairy tales. And, always, she jotted thoughts in her diary. Amid the diary pages detailing her life as a wife and mother — a child con5ned to bed by a cold, a worrisome report card brought home in a backpack, a spat with my stepfather — she recorded what she termed “visions” or “waking dreams,” or simply “the magic.” For me, these episodes invariably bring to mind William Blake’s boyhood apparition of “a tree 5lled with angels, bright angelic wings bespangling every bough like stars.” She, too, described a vision of angels, 4oating above her bed at dawn. She once saw a “turbaned, dusky djinn” 5gure, “faceless, featureless,” blessing my sleeping brother and me with a light touch on our foreheads, then 4oating away through the rooms; she had a night visit from her mother, with whom she conversed, argued, settled old scores. She received telepathic images of distant friends and relatives. Once, in the early seventies, while speaking by phone with a friend, Anne, who lived on the West Coast, my mother abruptly “saw” her. She asked Anne whether she had dyed her hair blonde, to which Anne, who had just taken a bath, replied, “No, but I have a yellow towel on my hair.” My mother then asked if she had put down blue-and-white 4oor tiles in her kitchen, to which Anne said, rather shaken, yes, she had. For my mother, even the most commonplace events tantalized with a promise of messages from the Other Side; a chance meeting with a friend at Macy’s department store, or an accidental phone call from a stranger would set her

?> T!" G#$% W!& N"'"$ C()" B(*+ (,- O.!"$ E//(0/ probing for cosmic implications in her diary or during our dinner conversations. Yet she retained a healthy, skeptical, common-sense humor about otherworldly matters. In the late 1950s, she wrote in a letter to my father, before they were married: “Yesterday, something odd happened. I was opening the clothes closet for a dress when I suddenly heard a mysterious voice saying in sepulchral tones, ‘Francie, #is is life.’ For one second, everything stopped completely. My hand on the closet knob was shaking. And then the moment passed — and that was all. I later thought, ‘If this is life, the least I could do is buy some nicer clothes.’ So I did.” A favorite phrase of hers was simply, “close enough,” said with a smile and shrug. One day, when I came home from school with a 5ve-dollar bill that a passenger had inadvertently left on a bus seat, she remarked that it was a “birthday gift” from the heavens. I protested that my birthday was two days away; she considered this a moment and replied: “Close enough.” My stepfather, a doctor, teasingly dubbed her “Mystic Lady” after the Gilbert and Sullivan lyric in HMS Pinafore, but he was eventually convinced that her psychic experiences were extraordinary. 2e views of her 5ve children varied widely. I was probably the most skeptical; I was deeply, if secretly, disturbed and resentful. In the decades since, although I have never beheld a vision or engaged in a telepathic communication, I have become accepting of my mother’s spiritual life. She was not eccentric or a crackpot, as I had feared, but was perfectly sane, and this lent her credibility for my stepfather, and now, for me.

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She once wrote that she’d had visions and heard voices even in childhood, but the 5rst “waking dream,” or vision, that she describes in her diary appears in January 1959, at age twenty-two:

Last night when I was trying to sleep, I saw emerge out of the darkness the 5gure of a nun dressed completely in black except for a little white around the head (not a regular headdress, though). She emerged, turned her back toward me, and disappeared into darkness. I “followed” her — she went through a door and down countless staircases until she was lost in endless shadows. I’m shaken, left with wondering Why? Why did she appear to me?

In the late sixties and early seventies, a period when my parents divorced and remarried, and my brother and I were very young, her visions became frequent. A few times they had a shattering impact, as I learned when I read my mother’s diaries after her death. About two years following her divorce from my father, she wrote of “seeing” the cottage in Ohio where they had lived a decade earlier:

November 15, 1970 I had a rather odd experience a couple of nights ago. In bed, I had a sudden view out of the window of my home in my 5rst year of marriage, 1959. I saw old trees under a heavy new snow fall. 2e snow was an inch or more thick in the branches. I was in the kitchen, my 5rst kitchen, looking out from between the curtains I had made. I had all but forgotten them, but there they were, a small red-and-green 4oral print on inexpensive, 50-cents-a-yard cotton, hand-stitched. But as I saw them, they were so brilliant, the colors so astonishingly vivid! 2e house, with its gay reds and yellows and cheap linoleum, seemed to exist — but

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not as one has a memory of a place. 2is sudden view moved me and brought a lot of pain but it had none of the quality of a memory, as I think of memory. Memory, to me, implies distance, muting of color, even a quiet, nostalgic feeling. You step back into somewhere. But this was as though I were there — it simply intruded itself so sharply and so suddenly, without cause, without reason. And the shocking colors and brightness! It was there — the room and me in it. Almost — ridiculous as it sounds — as if it had come to me. I don’t think a “memory,” if that’s what it was, had ever been so powerful. It had the quality of the actual experience — but that isn’t saying it, either. It was, in a way, almost psychedelic — more vivid than life, more intensely seen. And seemingly without point. 2is thing, this vision that hit me so unexpectedly and over an extended period of time, so that I lay there with tears running down my face in the dark, quite overcome by this disruption out of time, of a place which, uncalled-up by me, had such strength and brilliance. 2e curtains were so striking!

She recorded several religious epiphanies. One occurred when she held Hebrew scrolls after a nephew’s bar mitzvah in Cleveland. She could not read Hebrew, and the scrolls were rolled up, but they unleashed a sort of divine 5re through her, brought visions and revelation. She did not — perhaps could not — fully describe the moment, either in conversation or in her diary. She set down merely a short, intriguing note that evening:

I understood and “felt” the prayers. Yes, yes, oh yes, I kept thinking. I have no doubt now about life beyond life. About a universal mind in which I participate to a degree greater than most people. 2e experience opened me to understanding of all mystics East or West, religious or not. I could grasp St. John of the Cross or St. Teresa or Martin Buber or perhaps the Tibetan Book of the Dead, or the Su5s. I have much studying to do.

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A day later, her thoughts returned to the occurrence:

2e mystics are all saying the same thing. A great unity, oneness, love. Acceptance. Words that never meant anything to me before and now make sense. I felt it. I was swept up and caressed in that beauty. I begin to see it more and more around me. Begin to accept that I live with angels and monsters and visions. Mystical world is there. Want to go deeper into all of it. Must 5nd out.…

I couldn’t know it, but as my mother was beset by recurrent visions, she grew increasingly apprehensive:

I’m afraid. What happened last night — the visit of the goddess, the gowns, the feeling. Why am I so knotted? It’s the kind of near-anxiety feeling, the gnawing discomfort I have with the magic. 2e responsibility of such a relationship with her. She was surely the feminine presence of god — her presence was bliss and nurture and rising upward in magic 4ames of love — a sense of cosmic love. A pulse in the universe…I’m not ready for the life of a mystic.

Was my mother a mystic? The question, when I first considered it, seemed rather breathtaking, like suddenly wondering whether one’s mother was really an unknown Saint Bernadette or Mata Hari. The word mystic is so freighted with accumulated images, light and dark: one thinks of Paul struck blind by the heavens on the road to Damascus, Christian hermits in the Egyptian desert, Delphic oracles wreathed in vapors, Joan of Arc burned at the stake, processions of bloody flagellants, remote convents, candles and incense. But

?B T!" G#$% W!& N"'"$ C()" B(*+ (,- O.!"$ E//(0/ the word also raises the American hard-boiled view of the “mystic” — swindlers with Ouija boards fleecing suckers at rigged séances, and carnival hucksters with crystal balls and tarot cards. But it’s also true that through the ages innumerable “ordinary” people — teachers, shopkeepers, homemakers, farmers — have described mystical experiences. 2ere is no way to prove or disprove a vision, but the 5rst attempt to apply empirical methods to the study of mysticism was William James’ 1902 book, #e Variety of Religious Experience. James concluded that mystical episodes share several qualities — that they strike as 4eeting, ine=able, joyful moments of illumination about the unity of the universe. Subsequent writers have recalibrated or rejected James’ characterization, but his analysis remains a touchstone for researchers. My mother’s visions certainly correspond with many of those presented by James, although the imagery she beheld was not clearly identi5able with any single religious tradition. 2e daughter of a secular American-Jewish family, but well versed in major world religions, my mother saw images revered as holy across many cultures — angels, nuns, djinns, unicorns, and the 5re goddess of ancient cults. Her spirituality seems, at root, a belief in the immanence of a benevolent god in all creation, perhaps tinged with a pagan-like pantheism; she saw god, or gods, within all things — mountains, deserts, rivers — even where natural substances had been transformed by humans into objects, like skyscrapers and cars. One spring night in college, while walking through some woods near campus, she came upon a tree:

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Looking at the great-branched, stark black tree, I began to feel the old sense of magic. I saw its supplicat- ing, grotesque arms ensnaring the moon, and, standing very close, felt the power of that tree working on me. Its blackness drew me to it, looming before me, and living. Living, praying, as if frozen, momentarily stopped, in a grotesque satyr’s ballet. I knew again for those few moments the truth of the gods-in-trees, the ancient religions of the Celts and the Germans, that truth that I knew two years ago in another wood, and I felt wonder and joy.

Whether or not my mother would be considered a mystic, I’m sure that she believed her experiences were genuinely mystical and that, during the early seventies, she was verging on a mystic’s life. What such a life would have entailed for her, with her idiosyncratic beliefs, eludes prediction; but given her mixture of humor, common sense, 5erce independence of thought, and earthy sensuousness, I doubt that she would have followed any single religious path, or embarked on a life of asceticism. Her fear and bewilderment at being apparently “chosen” to witness divine revelations is also common among mystics. 2e visions seemed especially perplexing because her parents were practical people who dismissed the occult as foolishness. Her father, born into a large immigrant family on the Lower East Side, had scant schooling but resolute ambition. He had worked as a laborer, graduated to a bricklayer, and eventually established a successful home-building company in Ohio. Her mother, Claire, had a very di=erent upbringing: born in Bacău, she was a small girl when she traveled with her family across Europe to Paris; she lived there until she was a young woman, when the family emigrated to America. In Paris,

@3 T!" G#$% W!& N"'"$ C()" B(*+ (,- O.!"$ E//(0/ she became a Francophile, spurned Yiddish and Romanian. She bobbed her dark hair in the style of the twenties, spent extravagantly on Parisian middle-class fashions, and read French novels. For the rest of her life, in America, Claire assumed the persona of an exiled Parisian, a sophisticated European woman. She strove to obliterate the memory of her family’s rustic past in the Carpathian Mountains. Her adoring husband, whom she met in Pittsburgh soon after she landed in America, nicknamed her Frenchy. On her death certi5cate — she died of cancer when my mother was in college — he recorded, at her insistence, that she had been born in Paris, not in Romania: a 5tting end for a woman whose life was spent denying her heritage. Claire, predictably, shared little with my mother about her life in Bacău; she passed down no character descriptions, few anecdotes. But my mother, seeking a source for her own romantic nature, for her visions, embraced their life in Romania, home of the mystical “Gypsy,” and Transylvania, land of shades. She was grati5ed by the fact — a rare scrap she’d pried from her mother — that her grandmother Frima, in Paris, told neighbors’ fortunes, Romanian-fashion, by divining the signi5cance of the patterns of co=ee grounds at the bottom of emptied cups. Claire would add dismissively, “She didn’t believe in it, of course, but the neighbors kept coming back to her.” Although their views diverged about their family’s Romanian past, my mother, like Claire, prized their link with Paris. “Strangely, though,” my mother recalled in her diary, “her ‘wonderful’ girlhood in Paris seemed to have left only a few, quite bleak memories, or at least those she shared with me — playing in a cemetery one evening, her

@6 H%E'(#/ H!;#1%'/ brother’s rheumatic fever, alcoholic neighbors, getting lost, and bombs falling during World War I while she hid in a school basement wearing a black apron.” Our family’s life in Belle Époch and wartime Paris reached me, as a boy in downtown Manhattan in the seventies, through a stack of postcards my mother had saved from among Claire’s possessions at her death. 2e postcards were of sturdy cardboard with black-and-white photographs of Parisian street scenes. On their backs were notes by family members written in French or Romanian with fountain pens or pencils. 2e postcards had been sent to stragglers in Romania, and to friends, family, and beaux serving in the war. My mother, who had once written of her mystic experiences that she had “much studying to do,” began, in the early 1970s, to read widely on religion, parapsychology, clairvoyance, telepathy, witchcraft, and the lives of mystics. She also wished to learn about her lineage in Romania and about the country’s folk traditions. She noted in her diary about her great-grandmother:

Gittel — I must know more about Gittel, my great-grandmother, who had a cure — “a paste of some sort” — for cataracts. What happened to it? Where did she get the recipe? What was she in touch with? What about [illegible]? What about me?

One day, an acquaintance of my mother’s mentioned a curious fact which she wrote of the next morning:

I found out that according to Romanian folklore, I am eligible — if that word can be used — to become a vampire due to my birth in a caul. I am interested to know more about it.

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I happen to remember the morning my mother made this diary entry. I found her sitting in a robe at our old wood table by the photo of black-hooded Gittel and our Transylvanian relics. When she saw me she put down her pen and smiled impishly — she looked like Cyd Charisse or some other darkly beautiful 5lm star when she smiled — and she asked what I thought about having a mother who was a Transylvanian vampire. Her lovely, smiling face was veiled in curling smoke from her cigarette. For just a moment, I felt that my mother was a terrifying stranger.

I' S#8(#;*#$ 3BAD, when I was 5fteen, a translucent plastic container the size of a tea cup materialized on our living room shelf beside the chess board and the mortar and pestle. It held a handful of soil from the homeland, retrieved by my mother and stepfather during a summer trip — long sought-for by my mother — to Romania, at that time under Soviet rule. 2e soil, my mother said, came from the unholy of unholies: Vlad Dracula’s castle grounds at Poenari (or it came from near the grounds — it was, in any case, “close enough.”). 2e soil was midnight-black and seemed (did I imagine it?) strangely icy to the touch. 2at this small portion of Dracula’s castle grounds now rested in a prosaic plastic container in our New York housing development was disconcerting; it belonged more properly in a silver chalice, perhaps, in the cellar of a New England manor. By age 5fteen, I was well acquainted with Vlad Dracula and his castle. Among my mother’s books on mysticism, spirituality, and the occult was an illustrated biography of

@< H%E'(#/ H!;#1%'/ the prince. Accounts of his cruelty were so macabre they challenged belief. His favored method for mass-murder of his subjects earned him the sobriquet “the Impaler.” You couldn’t forget Vlad’s face. A portrait — the so-called Ambras Castle portrait — reproduced in the book, presents the prince in a chiaroscuro of deep shadows and lush scarlets, as though he’d sat for his likeness in a candle-lit dungeon. He wears exotic, opulent dress, mingling Ottoman pasha and petty European prince: a soft fur cloak and a red-velvet cap bedecked with pearls and with a central ruby set in an enigmatic eight-pointed gold star. He is a young man with smooth, lean cheeks, a long, narrow nose, and huge, dark eyes lit with a malevolent twinkle. He has an absurd Groucho Marx mustache, and beneath, what seems a faint hint of a grin, prompted by something (god only knew what) beyond the picture’s frame. Black, girlish ringlets 4ow from under his cap to below the collar of his cloak. He exudes a discomforting mix of rapacious- ness and softness, of savagery and decadent luxury — part clown, part 5end. I dared open the book only a very few times. I found in its pages the famous 5fteenth-century German woodcut of the prince feasting at a table in the open country amid naked peasants skewered on massive wooden stakes. Beyond this scene of agony and depravity rose his castle and our forested Carpathian Mountains — just a few crude strokes indicating trees and 5elds and pointed battlements. It was my 5rst glimpse of our ancestral homeland. I soon saw Transylvania again, in Hollywood’s Dracula (1931), with its striking opening scene of a horse-drawn coach racing wildly through those same Carpathian

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Mountains — here, they loomed up as endless sharp, bare, menacing peaks above the tiny, rattling coach. And the mountains returned yet again, but with a di=erent appearance, as 4ickering, indistinct wooded crags, in the German 5lm Nosferatu (1922), which I saw at about age thirteen. Dracula had intrigued me; Nosferatu conveyed a truly haunting image of Transylvania. Silent and primitive, the 5lm looks as though it might have been made in the 5fteenth century. In contrast to Bela Lugosi’s Mittel-European, elegant Count, the vampire in Nosferatu, Count Orlok, is grotesque — a rigid, skeletal ghoul with pointed ears, an unblinking, wide stare, curling claws, and a long, dusty, black coat. 2e undead Count alternates between a watchful, reptilian stillness and sudden, unreal speed, moving in weird, jerky movements in the accelerated 5lm. 2ese movies, along with the chiaroscuro portrait of Vlad Dracula, the gory, primitive woodcut, the peculiar relics in our apartment, and the frightening photograph of Gittel, all coalesced during my adolescence to form my imaginary Transylvania. I later read that in both 5lms the images of the Carpathians were as unreal as those of the woodcut: the mountains in Dracula were merely a painting on glass, an illusion born from a soundstage among sunny California’s orange groves; and the crags in Nosferatu were in fact Slovakia’s Tatra Mountains. Moreover, Bela Lugosi’s castle was a studio set, and the image of Nosferatu’s cli=-top dwelling was Slovakia’s Orava Castle. 2e real and the mythical Transylvania became hopelessly tangled: Vlad Dracula was real, but his crimes exceeded those of the movies’ imaginary monsters; Gittel

@? H%E'(#/ H!;#1%'/ was real, but she looked as otherworldly as Stoker’s Dracula himself; my mother’s visions were real, but they were as uncanny as those experienced by Nosferatu’s sleepwalking heroine, Nina; the Transylvanian musical instrument in our apartment was real, but it seemed as much a stage prop as the candelabras in Bela Lugosi’s castle; the soil from Vlad Dracula’s stronghold on our shelf was real, yet this soil was also in the co9ns shipped to London by the undead Count in the movies. Just as I puzzled over why my mother and stepfather had settled in the slum of the Lower East Side, I also wondered what had possessed my forebears to settle in this tiny forested land that was seen by the rest of the world as part campy joke, part terrifying nightmare. Like a horror-5lm character, I might have pulled my hair and cried out, Were they all mad?

BE( ;+ 0!$#*#%$. had almost certainly seen their homeland di=erently than I saw it. Since the late eighteenth century, the southern fringe of Europe had proven an ideal setting for British and French writers of Gothic tales. 2e Balkan countries were relatively near, both geographically and culturally, yet they were also su9ciently distant to inspire fantasies of a romantically medieval hinterland holding residues of the exotic East after centuries of Turkish occupation. 2roughout the nineteenth century, Gothic 5ction set in the Balkans proliferated. In 1819, John William Polidori published the 5rst modern vampire tale, “2e Vampyre,” set largely in Greece. 2e story became the basis for a play the next year by the French

@@ T!" G#$% W!& N"'"$ C()" B(*+ (,- O.!"$ E//(0/ writer Charles Nodier. A succession of vampire stories and plays followed, among them, in 1872, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla, set in the Austrian province of Styria, and in 1893, Jules Verne’s Castle of the Carpathians. When Bram Stoker began to research his vampire novel, he had an abundant lode of Balkan Gothic tales to mine. Stoker, a Londoner who had never visited the Balkans, originally set Dracula’s castle in Styria, following Carmilla. But during the seven years that he researched his book — mostly in the British Museum — Stoker’s readings prompted him to move the locale of his 5ctional Count’s castle to the more remote mountains of Transylvania. Scholars debate Stoker’s sources, but it’s widely believed that while he appropriated Vlad Dracula’s name, he did not know of the prince’s Poenari fortress. Instead, Stoker probably was stirred by a picture of another Transylvanian bastion, Castle Bran. He then “moved” that castle near to Tihuţa Pass (named Borgo Pass in the novel). Stoker’s castle exists, like its infamous occupant, only in the pages of his book. Dracula, today considered a classic novel, had only modest initial sales, although a successful play was adapted from the story. It’s doubtful that Gittel and her brood, sell- ing brushes by cart in the Carpathian Mountains, would have heard of the book, much less have read it. It’s also unlikely that they were aware of Gothic 5ction’s portrayals of the Balkans as a picturesquely rustic outpost of Western civilization, cursed by vampires and other 5ends. In any case, Transylvania would not have carried such sinister coloring for them; the region was merely their corner of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, shared with Magyars, Roma,

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Muslims, Saxons, and all the other human residue from millennia of migrations and invasions. When the family boarded the Orient Express in Bucharest — the “Paris of the East” — bound for the Paris of the West, they knew they were departing for a great world capital; but they would not have perceived their train journey, as I would in my imagination more than sixty years later in New York, as freeing them from Dracula’s kingdom of darkness into the City of Light. I had unwittingly imposed on my ancestors the Hollywood-created Transylvania that I had known. 2ey would not confront that celluloid land until about a decade after they arrived at Ellis Island. For while my family had probably been ignorant of Stoker’s novel and the play, there was no missing the 5lm Dracula or its horror-genre progeny. 2e movie was an international sensation, launching Bela Lugosi’s opera-cloaked Count as an enduring symbol in global popular culture and transforming Transylvania into the world’s mecca for spooks. 2e centuries-old Western European literary vision of the Balkans, as modi5ed by Universal Pictures, had been beamed to millions through innumerable darkened theaters. If I had once asked myself what my family was thinking when they chose to settle in Transylvania, I’ve recently speculated about their thoughts when, resettled in Ohio, they saw Bela Lugosi on the screen, roaming a decaying castle in a land of the undead which happened to be, of all the places in the wide world, their tiny, faraway patch of home. 2ey might well have been startled, and perhaps also indignant, but I prefer to think they enjoyed the movie with the rest of the audience. After all, Hollywood had depicted many peoples in derogatory, hackneyed ways — its rendering of

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Transylvanians was arguably among the least o=ensive. In Dracula, the locals are genial peasants who sport quaint, vaguely Old European attire, and quickly cross themselves at every mention of vampires — yet their lingering medieval superstitions, which are at 5rst scorned by the British traveler Jonathan Harker, prove born of age-old wisdom. And in fact, horror 5lms that followed Dracula were not always, or even mostly, set in Transylvania, and Dracula itself was largely set in London. Hollywood selected locales from around the globe for its early supernatural 5ctions: the Haitian jungles (White Zombie, 1932), the sands of Egypt (#e Mummy, 1932), the English countryside (#e Uninvited, 1944), the Welsh mists (#e Wolfman, 1941), and even Manhattan (Cat People, 1942). (It’s noteworthy that #e Wolfman is imbued by a “Balkans” atmosphere through a caravan of “Gypsies” who have brought the “wolfman” curse to Wales, and Cat People imports the Balkans to Manhattan with a Serbian woman who is also subject to an ancient curse from her homeland.) Horror 5lms that were not about supernatural phenomena but instead concerned the doings of evil mortals also were set in a wide range of places: Germany (Frankenstein, 1931), England (#e Invisible Man, 1933), the South Seas (#e Island of Lost Souls, 1932), Paris (Phantom of the Opera, 1925). Nevertheless, the notion that Transylvania was the capital of vampires, and later of supernatural 5ends generally, became lodged irrevocably in the public’s imagination as vividly as the image of the mad scientist wildly pulling levers in a laboratory, meddling in things that man should leave alone. Both the horror 5lm genre and its parodies 4ourished

AD H%E'(#/ H!;#1%'/ with the earliest movies. In 1912, for example, there appeared Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde, which was followed, in 1925, by Dr. Pickle and Pryde. By the time my mother was a girl, in the forties, movie studios could trust that an American audience, whether in a Kansas town or on Boston’s Beacon Hill, would recognize a send-up of its own horror-5lm conventions. My mother grew up, as I would, with the Transylvania of both Dracula and its parodies. Our image of the Old Country, like that of so many second- and third-generation Americans in the twentieth century, was largely formed by Hollywood, by a few family tales and photographs, and by a few stray relics. 2ese mingled popular and familial legends weaved a quasi-mythical land in the imagination, a land that was “home,” yet was also as strange and unreal as those regions that exist only in our dreams — or nightmares.

T!/%+, (,# ,%&$-$%&.&') &;%)# of Gittel is safely stored in a closet, along with the disintegrating chess board. But the mortar and pestle sits on a shelf in our living room, as it had sat on a shelf in my childhood apartment. I’ve told my son and daughter, who are nearing adolescence, about their Romanian heritage — about our ancestral home which was a “stone’s throw” from Dracula’s castle, about Gittel and her mortar and pestle, and about Paris. But they have shown only polite interest — they are preoccupied, as they should be, with school and friends. For them, Transylvania is not the Old Country; it’s too many generations removed. Too few family stories or character descriptions bind them to it,

A3 T!" G#$% W!& N"'"$ C()" B(*+ (,- O.!"$ E//(0/ and the Transylvania of Hollywood has been obscured by the distractions of the Internet and hundreds of television channels. Still, I was averse to family lore at their ages even as I absorbed it, so their Transylvanian heritage may yet prove meaningful to them. But what sort of signi5cance, if any, might Gittel’s mortar and pestle retain for them? 2at archaic brass artifact certainly won’t glow for them with a thousand memories, as it does for me, of my young mother in our housing development, writing in her diary at our wood table under Gittel’s watchful stare; nor will it serve, as it did for my mother, as a cherished link to the Old Country; nor will it conjure a Paris 4at during World War I, as it must have for her mother; nor will it suggest a lost home in the Carpathian Mountains, as perhaps it had for Frima, who had brought the mortar and pestle on the train to Paris. Like all family relics, our mortar and pestle has a radiance which changes quality with each generation and each person touched by it, simultaneously accruing and shedding the clan’s collective and individual memories and lore. 2e most famous heirloom in literature may be Jean Valjean’s candlesticks in Victor Hugo’s 1862 novel Les Misérables. Valjean, a former convict and galley slave, is wandering the French countryside in rags; one night, in the town of Digne, he is o=ered shelter at the home of Bishop Myriel; Valjean steals the silverware and slips away. 2ree gendarmes seize Valjean and return him to the bishop’s door. 2e bishop, rather than accuse Valjean of theft, greets him warmly and a9rms Valjean’s lie to the gendarmes that he had given Valjean the silverware, and adds, “I gave you candlesticks too!” Valjean nearly faints from shock at such

A6 H%E'(#/ H!;#1%'/ kindness. After the gendarmes leave, the bishop says, “Don’t forget, don’t ever forget, that you promised to use this silver to make an honest man of yourself.” Valjean treasures the candlesticks for the rest of his life, beloved symbols of Christian redemption. Years later, on his deathbed, Valjean gives the candlesticks to his adopted daughter, Cosette. “2ey are silver; but for me they are gold,” he whispers. But could those candlesticks evoke for Cosette, as deeply they had for Valjean, a life-changing incident with a priest? For Cosette, they would hold her own girlhood with her beloved stepfather, and that deathbed farewell. And what associations, if any, would those candlesticks hold for her children and grandchildren? Would they hear of Valjean and the bishop, or of Valjean’s deathbed gift of the candlesticks to Cosette? Or would these stories get lost over time? Would these children and grandchildren treasure the candlesticks for their own memories of their mother and grandmother? Or would they, or their own children, consider the candlesticks merely old-fashioned eyesores that came to the family long ago from who-knows-where? When heirlooms’ auras fade or become tainted, or when these objects must be relinquished under 5nancial pressures, they end up sold as trinkets or displayed in museums, as with Old Master portraits. 2ose antique candlesticks you see for sale in a junk shop might have belonged to some Cosette or Jean Valjean; that mortar and pestle being hawked in a street market someday may have been Gittel’s.

A*!E( (C#'(+ +#%$. %)!, I located my great-aunt Adele, who was Claire’s cousin, my mother’s aunt. She had, with

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Claire, spent her early years in the Carpathians, traveled with the family to Paris, and in the twenties had sailed for America. After tracing her through extended family to Pittsburgh, I called her. She was in her mid-nineties and, she told me, nearly blind. But her rasp still held traces of a cheery young girl: “You found me just in time!” she chirped during our 5rst discussion. I was about thirty then, and had contacted Adele because I’d become interested in our family’s past: my boyhood aversion to our Transylvanian heritage had dis- sipated; now I would have enjoyed speaking with my mother about it. But by this time she was bedridden with dementia in a nursing home. I would tell her my name, and that I was her son, and receive only an empty stare. Transylvania, Paris, Gittel, Frima, messages from Beyond — they meant nothing to her. Her visions and visitations had faded years before, as her disease progressed. Although her experiences with the “magic” had once frightened her, in retrospect she had viewed them di=erently. Early in her illness, she wrote:

I miss them, my angels and goddesses. 2ey were around for so long, and now it seems to have ended. No contact with them. It is as though a great light is absent from my life. I felt trans5gured by them, and now a lustre and incredible excitement and peaceful- ness and certainty have disappeared from my life, and I want them back. For that period, everywhere I read or looked, I read or saw revelation and conversion — Socrates, Pascal. I feel abandoned. Bereft. It seems like an immense task to call them back. If indeed they would return. And if their work was completed — what was it? What is it all about?

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She wrote that passage about 5fteen years before I had phoned Adele. Now, her journals lay forgotten by her in a closet. My mother’s older relatives in Cleveland had passed away by this time and the younger generations knew nothing about the family’s Transylvanian or Parisian past. So I was grateful for the opportunity to speak with my elderly great-aunt, the last survivor from the Old Country. We had several phone conversations over many weeks. Her memories of her youth remained remarkably clear. She described life in Romania and Paris; she recalled Gittel as indeed the matriarch of family tradition; she revealed that the family had left Romania because of business troubles; and she told me that in Paris, she and several other family members, including my grandmother Claire, had 5rst lived on the Rue du Tresor, in the Marais district in central Paris, a neighborhood with a large Jewish community; later, they moved to Rue Garibaldi, in the working-class suburb of Le Pré-Saint-Gervais. Adele, Claire, and others in the family worked at a fabric factory, which during World War I switched production to bandages. 2e factory was located on Rue Charles Nodier, a street named in honor of the author of #e Vampire, a coincidence that would certainly have amused and tantalized my mother. During these phone conversations with my great-aunt, I closely studied a map of Romania for the 5rst time. To my surprise, I saw that the town of Bacău lies outside the borders of Transylvania. For centuries, the town has stood just within the neighboring territory of Moldavia, east of the traditional Transylvanian border.

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Since my childhood, my mother had described the Old Country — our Old Country — as “Transylvania, in the Carpathian Mountains, near Bacău.” Now, the map seemed to prove false a lifetime’s belief. I asked Adele if Moldavia had in fact been home, but her memory on this particular point faltered, or perhaps the borders were not then well known or clearly de5ned. She told me that she had always thought they had lived in Transylvania but she knew for certain only that the family had lived “west of Bacău.” Given the small distances involved, it is quite possible that Gittel and her family lived within the Transylvania border, though it is equally likely they lived just east of it. Sitting with a map before me on a table, I imagined how my mother would have responded to this discovery. No doubt, she would initially have been a little disappointed; but then she probably would have dismissed it with a shrug: “close enough.”

2012

A? This Joy, This Freedom, This Challenge Reflections on a lifetime of running

he autumn I was nineteen, I began to run without T ever quite intending to — as though my legs marched me across campus to the track each afternoon of their own urgent will. 2e track was inside the 5eld house — or the “old” 5eld house as we came to refer to it, since the college replaced it before I graduated with a sleek new building. 2e old 5eld house was merely a converted World War II-era airplane hangar with little to recommend it; its concrete dome rose like the top of a dingy full moon behind the brick dormitories. When I entered in the late afternoons, the place would be echoing with the squeak of sneakers and thud of basket- balls on the polished wood courts, and with the metallic clanks of barbells in the weight room, where the football team exercised. 2ere might be a fencing class thumping around an upstairs studio. But the track room was nearly always deserted; after the door banged shut, I would be enclosed in its dim, waiting silence. 2e room had a neglected, makeshift atmosphere, was

A@ T!" G#$% W!& N"'"$ C()" B(*+ (,- O.!"$ E//(0/ relegated partly to storage, with canoes and kayaks propped against one wall, near sooty heaps of blue life-preservers and a few rusting weight machines. 2e poured-concrete 4oor lurched abruptly down on one end, which made running laps feel like circling a hillside. And the track itself — just a few concentric ovals of faded yellow paint along the perimeter of the room — was tiny and dizzying to follow. A single, small window framed a dormitory’s back wall, a dreary image that confronted me every ten seconds or so as I ran. I didn’t jog, I ran — demonically fast, in a wild sprint, for one mile — then sank weakly onto one of the stray dirty blue 4oor-mats, wheezing and coughing as I gazed up with sweat-blurred eyes at the distant ceiling lights. One mile wrung me out. I hadn’t exercised since I’d played baseball in Washington Square Park with my little elementary-school mates. 2e previous summer, I’d spent nights either drinking with musician friends in the smoky, deafening, clubs which in the early eighties clustered in downtown Manhattan, or I worked bussing tables in a Greenwich Village jazz club. When I woke in my father’s apartment, purple evening shadows would already be creeping up the row houses of Bleecker Street. I lived a nocturnal life, like those pale cave-creatures that blink blindly when confronted by daylight. My friends and I disparaged those few among us who had, we’d heard, gone o= to distant campuses and taken up athletics, such as tennis or running, as disgraceful conformists; yet here I was, somehow, a Midwestern college boy myself, running to beat the band, every day. I’d been sent orbiting that track by an interior explosion,

AA T,&. J!+, T,&. F$##/!;, T,&. C,%11#')# which in another age might have been diagnosed as a “nervous breakdown,” or perhaps a “case of nerves,” and I’d have been gently advised by a bewhiskered family doctor to “rest” for a year in the country, where I’d take long walks with the parson. Today, my condition might be termed “depression” or “anxiety,” and I’d be prescribed pills and sent for long talks with a therapist. But by any name, my condition was wretched. Until a few weeks before, I’d enjoyed my life at this small, private college. True, I had misgivings about returning to classrooms, and I’d su=ered a shock of displacement. But I relished what resembled, to me, the bucolic life of a young squire. I wasn’t quite Lord Byron with his tame bear at Cambridge, or Teddy Roosevelt with his private rooms and his houseman polishing his boots at Harvard; but there were morning lectures on Keats or Charlemagne, half-heard while I gazed out the windows at the turning leaves of the trees; and there were boisterous meals at the long tables at commons; and easeful naps among open volumes of the Romantic poets at the study hall; and late revels at the wood-beamed campus pub; and there were 4irtations with the fair daughters of Scandinavian farms, whose pale-blue gazes seemed otherworldly. 2ese pleasant hours were punctually marked by the chapel’s chimes, which drifted among the busy campus paths. To me, the little bells sounded as reassuring as a child’s lullaby. While the discarded newspapers on the cafeteria tables cried out the horrors of that time — gangs and vigilantes roaming the New York subways, famine ravaging Ethiopia, soldiers massacring villages in El Salvador, the IRA bursting bombs in Ireland, where bells tolled for the

AB T!" G#$% W!& N"'"$ C()" B(*+ (,- O.!"$ E//(0/ dead — here, nested deep within the vast farmland of the American Midwest, our chapel bells rang in peace; God was still in His Heaven, and all was right with the world. But suddenly that fall, all was not right with my world. In fact, my crisis had only appeared to strike suddenly. For weeks I’d ignored a growing unease — a vague dread of a storm threatening beyond a clear sky. 2e catastrophe came late one night. I woke breathless, panicked: a force, a living, determined force, was erupting from within — it rushed up my throat to my face, and then I was sobbing, for the 5rst time since I was a small boy. I gazed at my hands like an amnesiac, like a newborn, a stranger to myself. And that was the start of my troubles. I no longer recall the barrage of thoughts, memories, dreams, or intense emotions of those months, only that I was in a constant dread of my own deranged mind. When I wasn’t running the track, I mostly lay with my face plunged in my pillow, locked in my room; the armies of Reason and Madness were waging desperate, hand-to-hand combat in my head. Nights, I tossed until the dawn mercifully unveiled the tangled branches of the little crab-apple tree outside my window: then I could escape my room for a dismal breakfast at commons, which was vacant at that early hour — though I had little appetite. Afterward, I’d slip back to my bed through neglected paths on the edges of campus — I was as frightened of betraying my madness to others as of the terrors of my self-con5nement. In that less medicated era, it never occurred to me that pills could ease my panic, so I simply hid in my room. From beneath my window came the banter and laughter of students strolling to and from lectures, wayfarers from the hive-life

BD T,&. J!+, T,&. F$##/!;, T,&. C,%11#')# of the campus which was leaving me further behind each day. Once in a while, someone rapped on my door, maybe called my name and listened; but I kept quiet, waited for the departing footsteps. On better days, I resolved to attend lectures again, but blank terrors drove me from class to the solitude of a men’s room, where I splashed cooling waters from the sinks on my burning face and tried to compose myself, to soothe my whirling thoughts. Good Keats notwithstanding, I would go to Lethe, if only I could: my past, brief as it then was, had overtaken me. Mine was not a tragic childhood, as the world goes. I had no family murder or suicide to explain my condition; nor had I been left on a doorstep in a basket, nor toiled in a sweatshop, nor survived civil war. 2e sources of my childhood griefs were, by comparison, banal: my parents’ bitter divorce in the late sixties and our lives amid the muggings, poverty, and counter-culture mayhem of downtown Manhattan through the seventies and early eighties. As a teenager, my relationships with both my father and stepfather became rancorous. I adopted a protective conceit, drank and fought; in an act of unwitting revenge against my parents, I 4unked out of high school by skipping classes for weeks at a time, and nearly did the same at another school. Compared with the young men and women at college, I was a churlish, ignorant adolescent. Today, I consider my college admission a saving miracle; at the time, I enrolled with deep ambivalence, and only after a Quixotic journey to the Amazon jungle had produced a botched novel and stories, and sent me back to dreary Manhattan o9ces as a clerk. But if my troubles growing up had been comparatively

B3 T!" G#$% W!& N"'"$ C()" B(*+ (,- O.!"$ E//(0/ slight, they loomed large enough to me. And in any case they were certainly mine: they had pursued me faithfully to these far towns and 5elds, and now were demanding a reckoning. 2e secret fears and furies of childhood had been liberated, had burst through the trapdoor of consciousness, and now their legions darkened my inner sky, like the bats I’d seen winging across the moon on the Amazon River. Overwhelmed, my face buried in my pillow, I prayed for oblivion in sleep, even eternal oblivion. I was too proud to call home for a plane ticket back and too frightened to confess my agony to the college counselor — I feared I’d be wrestled into a white Cadillac by white-coated men, as in a horror 5lm, then thrown into a cell in an iron-gated sanitarium and never heard from again, despite my screams. Instead, I ran.

I .!!' E'/#$.(!!/ C,+ (,# ($%7- was always empty: aside from its lopsided concrete 4oor and dank gloom, the room was simply too small. 2e track might have been serviceable for an occasional sprint, but not for daily exer- tions and farther distances. And I was being lashed farther each day by a sort of survival instinct — the same that a few weeks earlier had set my legs marching to the 5eld house. Now, I was tearing up that Lilliputian track until I felt like a spinning top, a whirling dervish, sometimes twice a day. I needed somewhere to extend my runs, to fully exhaust myself so I could sleep, and so I could think through all I needed to. So one brilliant fall afternoon, when the lawns and

B6 T,&. J!+, T,&. F$##/!;, T,&. C,%11#')# columned buildings glowed in a late golden light, and the maples and elms across campus were releasing cascades of red and gold leaves to the winds, I found that my steps had abruptly veered away from the 5eld house; my legs now were marching me o= in a new direction — west — toward the town. Only a fool, my legs seemed to scold me with each quickening stride, would run inside the track on such a magni"cent day. However, I still lacked proper running clothes; I’d been wearing my old sneakers, the type of ubiquitous kids’ sneaker that was unchanged since the twenties: a thin sole of dead, 4at rubber sewn to a few bits of cheap cotton canvas, with a rubber toe-cap. And I’d been wearing the scru=y black clothes I’d brought from New York. 2at afternoon, clad in black, pale and unshaven, in need of a haircut, I realized that I probably looked like a thief as I darted through the town. But I also knew, after running under the high blue sky, in the cold fresh air, I that would never return to the cavern of the track. Laps in the 5eld house had brought some relief from my misery — the numb calm of exhaustion, of a purge; running in the open had brought something I hadn’t yet known — a taste of joy. 2e next day, I committed to running by an act unimag- inable only weeks earlier: I bought proper running gear, at the town’s sporting-goods store. But as I paid, I paused: an image had risen before my inner vision, of my musician friends, mocking me for my purchase. 2ey had appeared at odd moments since I’d left for college, a malicious Greek chorus. Now, with this apparently insigni5cant purchase, I was pulling further away from both my comrades and from myself — the mocking self who was among them in that

B: T!" G#$% W!& N"'"$ C()" B(*+ (,- O.!"$ E//(0/ image. I felt that I was being rent in two: I was discarding my past self, literally running from it, and toward a new, unknown self painfully emerging here, amid the alien corn of the Midwest. To my friends, and to my earlier self, I might as well have been buying farmer’s overalls instead of sweatpants, clodhoppers instead of running shoes, and a straw hat instead of a wool one; but I nevertheless left the shop with my purchases under my arm. After that, each day, I pulled on my running clothes and 4ed my room toward town. I tore through the streets until my lungs burned, and I’d stop and slump forward with my hands supported on trembling knees, and catch my breath. And I’d race on. Although running outside was far better than circling the track, I found that the town had a similar atmosphere of dreariness, of abandonment. Settled in the 1830s, it had an old main street lined by squat brick buildings. 2e streets had those most American names — Broad, Pleasant, Park, State, and Grand. Arriving from Manhattan, I’d regarded Grand Avenue with particularly lofty irony. But while there had been nothing grand about the town, it had once, at least, thrived. 2ere had even been streetcars: you could see them in old postcards and photographs, displayed in glass cases at the college library. And you could see, too, there had been a modest opera house, several large, elegant hotels, a movie theater, and restaurants. And there had been weekend crowds, and July Fourth parades, and rows of parked Packards, Buicks, and Fords. But like innumerable American towns, its center had been drained by suburban sprawl and by malls, and by the recession of the seventies, which had forced nearby factories to shed jobs, close, or leave. 2e town had sunk to its lowest point since the

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Depression. Most shop-fronts, still adorned with architectural 4ourishes from more prosperous years, had “For Lease” signs placed in dark, dusty windows. 2e empty silence of those streets, broken only by bird whistles, was poignant. Running through, I remembered New York as unreal, impossible — just as in Manhattan, I couldn’t quite believe in these empty, silent streets in the corn 5elds. I ventured in other directions from campus but learned there was only one way to evade the used-car lots, 5ll- ing stations, and derelict factories that radiated from the downtown. One day I headed east, and discovered a neighborhood of large Victorian houses with deep porches and broad lawns; and then the streets abruptly halted, as at some invisible border, and I was running, in exuberant disbelief, on a lone country road out through the open corn5elds. I would run Holley Road for the next three years. My 5rst glimpse of Holley Road was always thrilling. 2e two-lane blacktop, lined with telephone poles, gently dipping and rising straight out through the corn5elds, was a beckoning promise of the run ahead. At the sight, I often sprinted yet faster, sometimes letting out a wild whoop that echoed back from the low hills. Here, I was free — free from the sad town, and from the terrors of my room, and from the teeming campus. A city boy set loose in the country, I marveled at nature’s extravagance — how tall the corn was! How big the cows were! How raucous the 4apping black crows were! And, just as in children’s books, I found, crows did caw, geese did 4y in wedges, and barns were painted red. I jumped in fright at my 5rst encounter with a sun4ower — it towered above me, a few inches away as I ran by, almost human

B> T!" G#$% W!& N"'"$ C()" B(*+ (,- O.!"$ E//(0/ in its size and presence, as though glaring down with its great, dark, cyclopean orb, fringed with dusty gold petals. Back in Manhattan groceries, sun4owers had been tame and tiny, bunched in dainty bouquets for old ladies’ tables. Out here, nature was wonderfully loud, large, and unruly. But if I was free from the town and the campus, I wasn’t free from myself: I might have said, like Milton’s Satan, Which way I !y is Hell; myself am Hell. For after my initial exhilaration on reaching Holley Road, I would return to my thoughts, and while my body was speeding through the autumnal farms, in my mind I was leaping through 4ames and across precipices, grappling with my demons. At times, though, I’d be roused by a horse’s forlorn whinny carried across the 5elds, or by the rich scent of wood-smoke from a farmhouse chimney, or by a stray luminous shaft that had escaped through a crevasse in a range of storm clouds to cast a mystic spotlight far out on the wind-blown corn; and I’d savor the sound, the scent, the vision for a moment. And I’d run on.

T,!.# 0&$.( C##-. $E''&') H!11#+ R!%/, I continued to compulsively push farther each day, as I had in the town and the 5eld house. I knew nothing of interval training, reverse splits, anaerobic capacity — terms and techniques that were not yet common. I intuited my training methods, such as they were. I still often ran like a man pursued, which I suppose I was; but my stride, which had initially been self-conscious and awkward, became more 4uid as my body awoke from years of torpor and recaptured youth’s natural grace. I no longer needed to glance at my watch to

B? T,&. J!+, T,&. F$##/!;, T,&. C,%11#')# accurately gauge my speed; I developed the rather poetically named “runner’s heart,” the slowed resting pulse of distance runners. And because a sound nineteen-year-old body is resilient, my runs were stretching nearly ten miles by the time the 5rst snows whitened the stubbled corn 5elds. When I reached Holley Road each afternoon, I would have settled into the easy, brisk rhythm that country runners have known since at least the ancient Greeks; and I felt as 4eet and ageless as those naked, bearded, tiny-footed runners who dash around the sides of Grecian urns, tireless after more than two millennia. I felt as though I could run forever — into the next county, the next state, across the Canadian tundras, over the polar ice 4oes, through the Siberian steppes. Flying along the road, bundled in a scarf, wool hat, and gloves, with the white 5elds passing on both sides, screened by blurs of trees and rail fences, the sky perhaps a wintry, dull gray, I’d hear only my own steady breathing and the crunching of my sneakers on the snow at the road’s edge, strangely loud and distinct in the frosty air. I’d 5rst pass, on my right, the riding stables, where horses 4icked their tails within a maze of whitewashed fences; then I’d dash over the creek, winding away like a black mirror through the snow; then across the slow-curving freight tracks and between the farmhouses and their mailboxes topped with little mounds of snow; then around a bend, and on my left, a solitary, collapsing, weathered-gray, circular barn. I always cast a look at that barn, perhaps to see if it still stood. It leaned and sagged precariously, comically, far to one side, for no discernable reason — as though tipped over by the winds of a playful Boreas. After silently saluting this ruin, I’d continue until I

B@ T!" G#$% W!& N"'"$ C()" B(*+ (,- O.!"$ E//(0/ reached new, unknown country. And in the 5rst hints of the early winter dusk something miraculous would occur: the troubles besieging me would turn and retreat like brigand ships fading into fog, and my spirit would become su=used with warmth and light and new hope, even as the air turned colder and darker. Eventually, I’d run back toward campus; and later, when the highest reaches of the sky were night-black, and below lingered only a faint indigo glow which darkened upward, I’d run among the shadowy geometric shapes of the big houses, their windows bright, exposing the private lives within — the furniture in the rooms, the paintings on the walls, a family seated at the dinner table — brief domestic images glimpsed as I shot toward the dormitories’ clustered lights. 2en I’d propel myself even faster, crashing through the last wall of exhaustion, until the tips of my sneakers were barely skimming the snow. I was 4oating up through radiant realms, while below, someone else’s body was straining to its utmost in the cold night. Finally, at the campus, I would slow to a trot, then to a walk — the runner’s weary gait: hands on hips, head thrown back, chest heaving. I‘d make my way toward my room among students streaming back from late classes along the lawns, like specters in the night. It was always then, as my body cooled, that the gods stripped away their enchantment, and I was again reduced to a mortal — a foolish mortal who had strayed too far into the northern wilds. I would shiver in the searching winds, and my legs would threaten to buckle. Climbing the stairs to my room was a long struggle up

BA T,&. J!+, T,&. F$##/!;, T,&. C,%11#')# a Matterhorn. I’d grip the rail as though it were a mountaineer’s rope and pull myself up, one step at a time, with pauses to gather strength. Students passing on the stairs would ask with concern if I was all right, and I would nod — too exhausted to speak — yes. In fact, I was euphoric. At the summit, I’d collapse on my cot; but within, I was lying on the shore of an idyllic, arboreal lake of perfect stillness. 2en, up! And a scalding shower, followed by a furtive dinner at commons. And afterward, a few hours of study. Although I still wasn’t capable of attending classes, my professors had generously allowed me to attempt to keep up with their courses in the event that I managed to return. At the library, I always stole downstairs to the basement, to a hidden place where shelves of old scienti5c periodicals formed cloister-walls around a lone, small, pale-wood desk, like a monk’s study. Here, in a sort of languor, almost enfeebled, my mind becalmed, I would read until the words danced and mutated into senseless symbols before my closing eyes.

A. C&'(#$ /##8#'#/, the troubles that had sent me circling the track, and dashing through the empty town, and speeding through the farms, began to diminish. I’d returned from what had appeared the abyss of madness. Gradually, I again attended classes and caught up on studies. But I kept running. Emerging from the remembrance of things past, I focused on the present: I might set out from campus composing a term-paper or a letter home, or reviewing facts before a

BB T!" G#$% W!& N"'"$ C()" B(*+ (,- O.!"$ E//(0/ history exam. Or I drifted among the idle thoughts, reveries, and observations common to distance runners: I might remember a chore that awaited, or curse the irksome itch of a wool scarf; I might ponder the allusive, shifting shapes of the clouds as their great shadows brought a brief, 4owing darkness across the countryside. But as the miles passed, I would always begin to 4oat into a serene, empty rapture. To brave the winter — the interminable, ferocious winter of the northern Midwest — I was wrapped, buttoned, zippered, gloved, and fur-hooded like an old- time polar explorer. I strained to keep my balance on the frozen snow, slipping and sliding, sometimes falling. I ran when the trees cracked like distant, echoing gunshots in the cold, and when the snow swept across the 5elds in towering, twisting white sheets, and when gales held you back to nearly a standstill and numbed your face. On campus, the snow buried lawns and paths for months beneath deep drifts. Students trudged to and from lectures bundled to the eyes and bent against the winds. Everyone fell ill. By March, we were all a little mad for spring to arrive. So when a morning 5nally came with warm, earth-scented breezes blowing in your window from the farms, and you saw the snow was melting and dripping from roofs, and you heard the birds joining in celebratory chorales from all the bare trees across campus, it made your young heart swell. A giddy spring fever raged through campus which sent everyone outside. Games of catch were played in the slushy quad as if we were grade-school boys and girls at recess; students blithely strolled around in shorts and sandals. On Holley Road, the forsythia bushes were always

3DD T,&. J!+, T,&. F$##/!;, T,&. C,%11#')# among the most eager to leaf, bursting into cheery yellow sprays. At the rail fences, wild4owers bloomed lavender, white, and gold and blurred into Impressionist daubs as I ran by. In time, I learned the 4owers’ names — names which the youngest country boy would have known: daisies, dandelions, spiderwort, white clover. In the 5elds, the horses’ shaggy coats slipped away, and the brown land became covered with endless rows of young green corn and soybeans. Spring also brought the workings of nature’s immutable timetables along Holley Road. One week, squadrons of dragon4ies might cruise beside me; another week might bring woolly caterpillars undulating along the road’s gravel shoulder; next, perhaps, romantic pairs of Monarch butter4ies would 4utter around me — each species, like the opening 4owers, witlessly following its ordained schedule. And as I started back toward campus at sunset, the kindly 5re4ies would light the way ahead along the rail fences, and the starlings would become uproarious in the shadowy masses of trees. Such prosaic country wonders kept me running Holley Road and never becoming bored. At the end of the academic year, I was among the few students who stayed on campus to work or study through the summer. I did both: I prepared for next fall’s classes and I worked for pocket money with the college’s maintenance crew. We trimmed shrubs, raked leaves, removed pews from the chapel for repairs. After work, I read mathematics or science textbooks on the grass. I was serenaded by the cicadas, concealed in boughs almost black in their lush depths. 2eir rhythmic, metallic clicking, rising to deafening crescendos before fading away, only to rise again, was as

3D3 T!" G#$% W!& N"'"$ C()" B(*+ (,- O.!"$ E//(0/ regular and hypnotic as the ocean surf. 2e cicadas were my sole companions: I would read for hours in the green stillness without glimpsing another soul. Each afternoon culminated in a long run. And now I would enter another type of uncanny solitude — the deep, high-summer hush of the Midwestern farms. Out here, the oppressive heat had driven everyone indoors. 2e rocking chairs on shady porches were empty; the yards were cleared of children; even the crows had abandoned the 5elds. It was as though some cataclysm had emptied the world. 2e burning sun would force me to strip o= my drenched shirt, and I’d speed nearly naked, alone on the earth, between eerily silent walls of dark-green corn, higher than my head and crowned with golden tassels. A few miles out, there was a gentle rise of the land along the road on one side, which, when the corn was tall, was for me like a rising green wave, forever poised at the point of breaking. I imagined that if I could look over its crest, I’d behold an endless sea of green corn reaching toward my own distant city of New York. 2is small rise somehow inspired a reverence for the beauty and grandeur of all America beyond, and it cast my thoughts back to the days before the corn and soybeans, when wagon trains crossed the high grass of the prairies. Once, I was so overcome by an urge to glimpse the green sea I imagined that I stopped running and plunged straight into the corn and pushed up the rise; but I saw only the stalks looming close around me like a green, silent prison. From time to time, I would follow other roads through new landscapes — wild meadows, or fallow 5elds, or pig farms with their vile, fecal stench. Unfamiliar streams would

3D6 T,&. J!+, T,&. F$##/!;, T,&. C,%11#')# snake beside me; fences engulfed by blackberry bushes would give way to woods; dogs would leap at gates, baring teeth and barking frantically after me. I might follow a rutted dirt lane through its bee-swarmed gorge of high corn, scented of dust and 4owers, like a path leading to the edge of the world. 2ese solitary, pastoral days ended in late August, when students and faculty converged on the campus for the fall semester. You’d 5rst see a professor, perhaps holding a brief- case, plodding with an inward gaze along the paths, or you’d notice a family unloading a freshman’s suitcases and boxes from a car. 2e campus, which I had roamed like my private estate, was suddenly invaded, transformed again into a busy hive. 2en the north winds would 5nd their way back, and the green corn along Holley Road would begin to lighten to a yellowish brown, and the combines would appear, complicated metal contraptions roving like giant, foraging insects, buzzing and rattling and spouting clouds of dust from the corn they harvested. 2ey left behind wastelands of broken stalks, revealing vistas of long-concealed, wooded hills lit up with autumn colors. About this time, a fragile skin of translucent ice again edged the surface of the creek, and the cold sky was loud with honking geese cruising south in perfect wedges. And then the 5rst snows again obliterated the broken corn stalks, and the winter holidays again swung around. In this way, while I ran Holley Road, the seasons and the years passed. Always, I was jubilant amid the wild beauty of the countryside. Ecclesiastes counsels: Rejoice, O young man, in thy youth, remove sorrow from thy heart. And I did rejoice those seasons of running, as I never had before. But after three years, my last run on Holley Road

3D: T!" G#$% W!& N"'"$ C()" B(*+ (,- O.!"$ E//(0/ inevitably arrived. It was on a sunny, hot, May afternoon, the day I graduated. As I ran, my packed bags waited in my room; a few hours later, I would leave for the airport. 2at day, toward at the end of my run, which was among my farthest, I stopped at the entrance to Holley Road and turned back. I stood and saw it gently dipping and rising through the young corn, beckoning me with the promise of the next day’s run, which I’d never take. I was grateful: Holley Road had been my track, my doctor, my parson, my therapist — my road back to myself.

I ,%"# $E' #"#$ .&'7#. Mostly, I’ve run at the reservoir, in New York’s Central Park, though I’ve brought my gear wherever I’ve traveled. I’ve circled New England towns at dawn and dodged Chicago evening rush-hour tra9c; I’ve struggled on trails in the Rocky Mountains and followed dirt paths in the Holy Land. Among my most cherished places to run is the beach, with its endless strip of wet sand, its foamy surf and salty winds, its hovering seagulls and festive crowds. I even journeyed from Manhattan to run Holley Road, a quarter century after I last saw it. It was predictably built up here and there: a warehouse stood in what had been an open pasture, and several new homes had appeared along the road. 2ere were other changes: the collapsing circular barn had been cleared away, and the riding stables, I was told, had burned down many years earlier — I saw an overgrown clearing where the horses had once grazed among the white fences. Nevertheless, the road still led, gently dipping and rising, straight out through the corn, greeting me with its invitation to run,

3D< T,&. J!+, T,&. F$##/!;, T,&. C,%11#')# as though I’d just emerged from a lecture on campus. 2e winding little creek was still 4owing and tinkling over the rocks, the freight tracks still curved past, the rail fences were still overwhelmed by wild4owers. I was pleased that I could cover a respectable distance, although I had a dispiriting sense of trailing my younger self. It was while running Holley Road again that my mind wandered o= to muse on how many miles I’d put behind me since I’d 5rst entered the 5eld house that day at age nineteen. I estimated that I’d covered well over 25,000 miles — equivalent to crossing the United States at least eight times, or running the circumference of the earth. Added up, it’s comparable to running day and night for more than one year. What these somewhat fanciful tallies brought home to me was, simply, how astonishingly much running I’ve done. Perhaps because I haven’t joined a runners’ club or competed in a race, I’d never considered myself a serious runner. But I realized that running has been a crucial part of my life longer than any job or friendship — longer than my marriage of twenty-5ve years. I have, of course, asked myself why. 2e vast literature on running abounds with attempts to convey its special rewards. 2e British runner Roger Bannister, who gained world fame in 1952 for breaking the four-minute mile, wrote with splendid brevity and precision that running “brings a joy, freedom and challenge which cannot be found elsewhere.” It is this joy, this freedom, this challenge which keeps me, and countless others on every continent, running mile after weary mile, pressing on through pain, exhaustion, and punishing climates.

3D> T!" G#$% W!& N"'"$ C()" B(*+ (,- O.!"$ E//(0/

Bannister recalled that his earliest signi5cant memory of running was on a beach as a boy. He had been so enchanted by the beauty of the sea and sky that he spontaneously began to run:

I was running now, and a fresh rhythm entered my body. No longer conscious of my movement I discovered a new unity with nature. I had found a new source of power and beauty, a source I never dreamed existed. From intense moments like this, love of running can grow.

Yet Bannister, who would become an eminent neurol- ogist, also acknowledged a neurochemical origin for the joy of running. 2e precise cause was not yet identi5ed in 1955, the year Bannister published his autobiography, #e Four-Minute Mile; he referred to the phenomenon vaguely, as “small electrical impulses,” which, when thrust by the straining body to the brain, are “a source of pleasure.” In subsequent decades, scientists found evidence that the beta-endorphin, when incited by exertion, reduced stress and elevated mood, even to a state of euphoria, similar in e=ect to morphine. More recently, the neuro-transmitter anandamide, a natural cannabinoid, has been recognized as a root of the runner’s “high.” Nothing might appear more dissimilar than the picture of the runner 4ying lightly across the open countryside and that of the dreamy cannabis smoker or of the recumbent dwellers of the opium den, eyes half-closed, wreathed in a blue haze. But we are joined by our addictions, which are chemically related. (2e word endorphin is a combination of the Greek words for “from within” and “morphine”;

3D? T,&. J!+, T,&. F$##/!;, T,&. C,%11#')# anandamide stems from the Sanskrit ānanda, a word for “joy,” or “bliss.”) I know now that my desire to run, from my 5rst wild laps around the 5eld house track, assumed the urgency of addiction. While con5ned at a morning lecture, I had only to imagine my afternoon run, to picture Holley Road leading away through the 5elds, and my muscles would tense and 4ex excitedly of their own, and my heart would quicken; I would tremble like a junky imagining a 5x. 2e craving remains undiminished, even now. While driving a country highway, I might suddenly feel electri5ed as I imagine how it would be run it; or I’ll steer past a jogger going at an easy pace along the shoulder, and my legs share the strides; I yearn to leap outside and start running, too. My addiction compels me onward, despite the harm to my body. In college, while climbing the dormitory stairs, my legs verged on buckling; in recent years they have buckled, and left me helplessly sinking to the ground. 2e pains roam, multiply, mutate: cure one and another insinuates itself elsewhere. When they become too debilitating, I rest for a week or a month. But a day will come — a brilliant summer morning or a bracing fall afternoon — that beckons irresistibly, and my run-worn body will tingle with the same fresh expectancy as at my college lectures more than a quarter century ago, and I’ll throw on my running clothes. I’ll start trotting cautiously, alert for signs of discomfort, relieved if none appear. Stop running, warn the doctors, with their X-rays and medicines. Take up a sport easier on the body, advise the physical therapists, with their foam rollers, medicine balls, and pulleys. Why must you run? What is special about simply

3D@ T!" G#$% W!& N"'"$ C()" B(*+ (,- O.!"$ E//(0/ running? ask my non-runner friends, my wife, my children. To them, I am merely putting one leg before the other for locomotion, until I’m spent and, often enough, crippled. I reply that, yes, at 5rst, I am “simply running” — plodding, burdened by small cares. But soon I begin to lighten in spirit and limb, and the familiar serenity begins to settle within, and 5nally I am not thinking at all, not even quite aware of all that blurs by, and I am, in a quite di=erent sense, simply running.

B+ '!C, I’"# *##' $E''&') the path at the Central Park reservoir for nearly three decades, and I’ve come to feel as possessive about this meandering dirt loop as I still am about a certain undistinguished stretch of road among the farms halfway across the country. 2e same boyish thrill that gripped me each day at the 5rst sight of Holley Road grips me now when I see Central Park through the Engineers’ Gate. 2e gate’s high gray stone walls, with their two carved lion faces 4anking the entrance like somber sentries, are a portal to an Elysium in the heart of the city. Just a few yards beyond stands a majestic English elm, casting shade on the bridle path as it climbs away toward a tunnel of cherry-tree branches. Here, I leave behind upper Fifth Avenue’s gilded-age mansions, pre-war apartments, museums, and tra9c, and cross a threshold into a green world. 2e reservoir is concealed at the Engineers’ Gate by a terrace wall, inlaid with a gilt bust of the city’s mayor during World War I, John Purroy Mitchel, and topped with a balustrade. As you ascend the curving stairs and emerge at the top of the terrace, which is also part of the

3DA T,&. J!+, T,&. F$##/!;, T,&. C,%11#')# running track, the reservoir spreads out suddenly before you, a great expanse of water which is always startling to come upon, a small lake. 2omas Levy, protagonist of William Golding’s 1974 novel Marathon Man, who runs daily on the track, muses: “Whoever invented the reservoir must have done it with him alone in mind. It was without 4aw, a perfect lake set in the most unexpected of locations.” I suspect that many runners feel that the reservoir must have been made with each of them alone in mind. A wooded lake ringed by the towers and bustle of a great world capital, it does appear perfect in its balance of city and nature — a swaying equipoise, alternating, mingling, yet without quite overwhelming each other. Circling the reservoir year after year (though the lake is not a circle but amoeba-shaped), I am, as on Holley Road, never bored. Perhaps if I ran farther, the laps would become con5ning, like the track at the old 5eld house; but I run fewer miles than I once had, and the path around the water is long enough, at about a mile and a half, and varied enough — with gentle curves and abrupt twists, and two old stone water-stations, and dainty foot-bridges arching across the parallel bridle path — that I never tire of it. While I once watched the play of sunlight on the Midwest 5elds and hills, at the reservoir I follow the light shifting on the apartment buildings that rise beyond the trees; or I watch the lake change character with the weather. On a bleak, cold day, the surface may become a choppy slate-gray, nearly black, its angry little waves 4ecked with foam and hovered over by alarmed gulls; in summer, it may appear a placid milky green like a tropical lagoon, or

3DB T!" G#$% W!& N"'"$ C()" B(*+ (,- O.!"$ E//(0/ form a mirror of sky and clouds, broken by swaths of silver ripples. At times, the reservoir lies so perfectly tranquil and lovely it might be the incarnation of the idyllic, arboreal lake I found within myself while collapsed on my cot in my dorm room after a run. Inevitably, I watch other runners. 2ere are quite a lot of us. 2e reservoir track is among the busiest in the world, luring thousands daily, including map-clutching tourists, weekend ramblers, and binocular-peering bird-watchers. Runners barely skirt collisions, yet somehow, we all co-exist harmoniously along this slender dirt path no wider than a sidewalk. I have never witnessed a dispute, even among the sparrows or ducks. 2e beauty of the place casts a disarming enchantment. While threading among the crowds, I read runners’ shirts and jackets emblazoned with slogans or the names of music festivals, marathons, or corporations. I link the words into surreal poems. In warm weather, runners’ tattoos are exposed, and pass like hieroglyphics — an eagle, a Jolly Roger, a single, gazing eye. I wonder at their messages, their signi5cance for their bearer. I hear intriguing bits of conversations that swerve me momentarily into other lives, other New York worlds — a bar mitzvah, a job o=er, a wedding, a Wall Street deal. Occasionally, I’m tempted to halt and ask questions, such as when I recently heard a schoolboy remark excitedly to his companion, “If I could go back in time, the very "rst thing I’d do —” but then I was out of earshot. Yet even among the crowds and towers, I can, with some e=ort, block them from awareness and enjoy a sense of solitude nearly as perfect as I’d had among the 5elds

33D T,&. J!+, T,&. F$##/!;, T,&. C,%11#')# along Holley Road. And I’m often reminded of Holley Road, despite its obvious di=erences with the reservoir. 2e two places share the changes of the seasons, and that draws them together for me. 2e arrival of spring is as magical here as in the Midwest. Each April, the famous white-and-pink Japanese cherry blossoms burst into bloom, and the arching branches create long, dim, rosy-hued vaults, with petals carpeting the path beneath. And there is the blossoms’ dreamy ambrosia, as heavenly as any perfume in nature, so that I feel I might have run straight into the next world. I recognize many of the same 4owers that I knew on Holley Road, and the forsythia bushes here, too, leaf early, as 4ashily yellow as the taxis glimpsed through the trees on Fifth Avenue. Warm weather also brings the familiar escorts of dragon4ies, caterpillars, and butter4ies, each following its ordained schedule. I am, however, joined each spring at the reservoir by certain companions unknown to me on Holley Road: the high schools’ running teams — the gaggles of boys and girls who train on the track or the adjacent bridle path and then vanish for summer vacations. Here, distinctions between the timetables of nature and humans blur. In summer, the path is overrun by a surprisingly rich rural lushness that returns me to the mysterious back roads I’d occasionally stray onto among the corn 5elds. Ivy curls thickly up the oak and plane trees, the 4owers reach as high as my head, and the air hangs as heavy, dusty, and sweet as in a summer meadow. Raccoons, squirrels, chip- munks, robins, sparrows all emerge. 2e reservoir’s air-space becomes busy with ducks, cranes, gulls. Summer evenings, the sky softens slowly to an indigo glow above the West

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Side apartment buildings, transforming them into 4at black geometric shapes. Along the track, the old-fashioned, cast- iron street-lamps shine in the dusk, and the 5re4ies, as on Holley Road, show up to guide me. With autumn, the city shakes o= its summer lassitude and revives, as the campus did. 2e streets around the park suddenly swarm with kids wearing uniforms and toting knapsacks, starting a new school year; morning buses are packed again with people bound for o9ces after vacations. Soon the park’s nearby tennis courts will lie empty and puddled, and I’ll be treated to the reservoir’s autumnal tone poems as the trees turn warm colors and re4ect their twins on the water. As the leaves begin to drop away, scenes of Fifth Avenue are revealed, like the Midwest hills exposed by the harvested corn. I’ll see more and more of the squat gray spiral of the Guggenheim Museum; I’ll see the ever- changing, bundled-up queue at the bus stop beneath the giant American elms; the hotdog vendor’s cheery orange- and-red umbrella at the corner; the uniformed, white-gloved doormen hailing taxis; the dog walkers with their frisky charges — the facets of Manhattan life from which I am partially screened by the trees and by the park’s stone wall. Winters are milder than in the northern Midwest, but there is usually a week or two when the track is covered with snow, and I’ll test what’s left of my agility. At the 5rst snow storm, I’ll dash out, as eager as the boys and girls I pass on the sidewalks released from school and dragging sleds toward Cedar Hill with a parent or nanny. At the track, I’ll pass a few other resolute runners, a cross-country skier, an intrepid photographer, a couple out for a walk. We share the special quiet of the park after a snow — the distant

336 T,&. J!+, T,&. F$##/!;, T,&. C,%11#')# church bells on the East Side chime as clearly as though from a nearby village square. But as rural as it may feel, the reservoir always rebalances, jolts you back to Manhattan. 2e towers intrude their re4ections across the water; the jets from JFK or LaGuardia airports streak across the sky; the car horns on Fifth Avenue create the same uproarious bedlam as the starlings in the trees on Holley Road.

SE$$!E'/#/ %( (,# $#.#$"!&$ by runners of every age, race, ethnicity, and physical condition, I am inevitably reminded of the old saws about the “race of life,” the “seasons of life,” “the cycles of life.” 2e track is a living metaphor for the eternal ring of life, the endings that are also returns to beginnings. On that narrow ribbon of dirt under the trees, young and old, quick and slow, proud and humble all run together, in allegoric variety — the human race, indeed. 2e 4awed, sometimes ridiculous strides, and the touchingly determined faces, distill all of our imperfections, our struggles, our heroism and, too, our absurdity. 2ere are usually a few elderly men and women out trotting, or shuFing along, some so bent and rigid it’s clear the race of life is nearly done for them. I know that I will someday be among these ancients. Now and then I feel that I already am: when I creak along on a bad day and am overtaken by a trio of slender young men or women who 4ash past as gracefully as the runners on a Greek vase, I will become them, passing me, a hu9ng old man. New life rushes past old, as it must, in thoughtless rebuke.

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As Emerson wrote, “Nature abhors the old, and old age seems the only disease; all others run into this one.” 2e special challenge at the reservoir in one’s 5fties is to accept nature’s inexorable cycles while joyfully fending them o= with each stride. It can be all too easy to see the grinning skull tattooed on the shoulder of the girl dashing by as a grim memento mori. Still, there are also good days, when the green life-force suddenly, mysteriously, resurges to full tide, and then I embrace the old feeling that I am more soaring than running. And on those days, as I circle the track, I circle back to my own beginnings, and experience the same joy and freedom and challenge that I felt the autumn I was nineteen, when I began to run without ever quite intending to — as though my legs marched me across campus to the track each afternoon of their own urgent will.

2017

33< In the Ashes of Music Row A final visit to New York’s legendary street of music shops

n an overcast Sunday last autumn, my son, Jonathan, O and I rode the subway to Music Row, near Times Square, to buy him a saxophone. He’d been playing in his school band with a Board of Education-provided antique — a wheezy old trouper, scarred and in5rm from the indignities of long service in the city’s unruly classrooms; when in repose, it seemed to be already resting in state in its rectangular black case, like a little casket. Jonathan had been pleading, over several months, for a replacement. Now, at last, we were going to get him his own saxophone — his 5rst instrument. I told him we would go to Music Row, the city’s legendary street of music shops. I myself had often gone there when I was a student, and I retained fond, if faded, memories of the place. Jonathan, of course, needed no persuading; and so that Sunday we took the subway toward the row. We emerged near Times Square, and I led Jonathan toward a patch of Forty-eighth Street, just east of Seventh Avenue, where I recalled the row was located, in a clutch of worn walkups that had survived amid Midtown’s towers.

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2e streets, drained of weekday crowds, were trash- blown, su=used with that deserted, dream-like air that pervades Midtown on a gloomy Sunday. I suppose the atmosphere a=ected me, for I was beginning to feel rather gloomy myself for no discernable reason. But it had no pull on Jonathan, who was buoyant, bursting with cheerful talk, and hurrying me along to the row, as I tried to keep pace. “Slow down, Jonathan,” I 5nally admonished. “It won’t vanish before you get there!” 2e hackneyed parental reprimand was never proved so wrong: when we arrived at where the row should have been, I found that, miraculously, it had vanished. I stood on the pavement like a lost soul, confronted by locked gates, dark windows, and here and there a sooty shop sign not yet removed. 2e ramshackle facades looked weirdly still in the gray day, like a frieze or a modernist sculpture. I had heard, or perhaps read somewhere, that the shops of the row had been dwindling, but I was unprepared for such desolation. Jonathan, who was glancing doubtfully around my promised land of musical abundance, led me to one of the shop windows. It, at least, was still lit and reassuringly crammed with a cornucopia of trumpets, trombones, and clarinets. We were in front of Sam Ash, among the last survivors of the row. Certainly it was the largest, with a second shop directly across the street, under the name Manny’s, a famous rival Sam Ash had bought. But, as I was to learn, the row would lose Sam Ash, too, just a few months afterward, when both stores 4ed before a wrecking ball. Sam Ash’s departure would bring a 5nal silence to the row, whose origins traced back nearly a century, to the years after World War I. Generations of children had bought their 5rst

33? I' (,# A.,#. !0 ME.&7 R!C instruments on the row — I had bought mine here. Now, by a 4uke of historical timing, my son would be among the last boys to visit the row — perhaps even the very last boy. Jonathan turned from the window and the displayed instruments. “Let’s go inside,” he urged. We went in. Tentatively, we wandered among long, low, pew-like shelves of sheet-music and music-instruction books, which were being picked over by a few Sunday browsers. 2en we reached an inner glass door to a narrow chamber, dim as a chapel. Small lights gleamed along the sinuous curves of trumpets, saxophones, trombones, and French horns arranged along the walls and inside glass cases. 2ere was only one customer here, a bearded young man wearing a cap, who was softly trumpeting a melody that was oddly mournful and haunting. Jonathan and I paused at this threshold. From the moment we had entered the store and seen the pew-like shelves, I had felt a stirring of memory. Here, at this inner room, I felt the stirring again. 2e room appeared so familiar — just as I had left it more than thirty years before. Was it possible that nothing had changed in all those years? Suddenly, standing here, exactly where I had as a teenager, an emotion of unexpected power 4ooded me — a deeply warm yet melancholy feeling, of both coming home and of having been gone too long.

I ,%/ 0&$.( %$$&"#/ %( (,# $!C in the autumn of 1978, at barely fourteen, while attending Music & Art High School, where I was studying to be painter. 2e school was a sort of conservatory and attracted the most

33@ T!" G#$% W!& N"'"$ C()" B(*+ (,- O.!"$ E//(0/ talented students from across the city. My 5rst weeks there were spent drifting in astonishment; I felt a bit like an early European explorer stepping onto an exotic land. Rather than fezzes or turbans, silk robes or grass skirts, the students thronging the halls and sidewalks were adorned with spiked bracelets and collars, biker jackets and torn T-shirts, World War II o9cers’ overcoats, vintage neckties, Woodstock-era cotton dresses and sandals, vinyl miniskirts and 5shnet stockings, Army boots and Capezio dance slippers, bleached Mohawks and Regency England curls. 2ese young artists and musicians, converging each day on the school from the furthest reaches of the boroughs, re4ected the diverse and often discordant youth- subcultures emerging and ebbing at that time, and there also were those who simply delighted in displaying their own quirky fashion sense. In retrospect, I’m sure most students appeared rather ordinary, but the large and colorful minority burned a lasting impression. I fell in with a sprawling, 4amboyant group who, rather inexplicably, were nearly all enrolled for art, yet whose true passion was for music — not the sort taught in our classrooms, but the music blasting through the downtown clubs of those days — 2e Mudd Club, Danceteria, CBGB, Max’s Kansas City. My schoolmates lived for this riotous din, and as young as they were, they were already appearing on the stages of those clubs, from the obscurest dives to the legendary venues. Apparently, they were able to multiply themselves — nothing else could explain how they each played in a half-dozen bands simultaneously. 2ey rehearsed in the evenings and on weekends, and they carried their instruments everywhere, in black cases.

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Many of this group I had, in fact, known since we were quite young, because Manhattan children were funneled through the public schools nearest their homes, and many of us had lived downtown, in the Village, or SoHo, or the Lower East Side. Others, though, had grown up in neighborhoods beyond my world, with strange new names — Morningside Heights, Astoria, Park Slope. 2rown among these gifted students, at this prestigious old school, I felt ashamed of my youth, my backwardness: my schoolmates dazzled me with their precocity, their cynical wisdom, their quick wit, and their encyclopedic knowledge of, and devotion to, music. 2ey argued and conversed about music constantly; they passed around the latest rock-music magazines and disputed, with high-spirited ridicule and much laughter at each other, the merits of bands and songs that I alone apparently hadn’t heard. 2ey oozed music — the latest 45s spilled out of their schoolbags; guitar picks surfaced from their pockets along with loose change. 2ey spoke of occult secrets like modal scales and minor keys and harmonizing in thirds; and they spoke of gigs and set lists and ri$s and reverb. Sometimes, after classes, they might ride the subway to Music Row to gape at guitars, basses, drums, and ampli5ers, though they generally didn’t buy anything more expensive than a package of strings. I began to tag along, from curiosity and a taste of grown-up adventure. We would trek through the neon-lit sin and squalor of Times Square in the wintry dusk, a knot of middle-class schoolboys dressed in costumes of revolt, toting instrument cases and book-bags. 2en we’d turn from the broad square into West Forty-eighth Street — narrow, shadowed, teeming — and reach the row.

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Although my initial visits were merely after-school jaunts, the row quickly captivated me. It appeared a mysterious, insular, bustling kingdom hidden in plain sight in the heart of the city. I was unaware that the row I had discovered was a shrunken vestige of its former splendor. In the row’s heyday — from the 1930s through the sixties — the entire block of Forty-eighth Street between sixth and seventh avenues, and the streets around it, over4owed with businesses, large and small, catering to the music trades — not only instrument and record stores, but also tap-dancing studios, show-rehearsal spaces, piano and violin schools, singing instructors, concert agents and impresarios, sheet-music suppliers. In the era of the Broadway musical, when jazz pulsed through Times Square and Fifty-seventh Street, and popular songs were beaten out of upright pianos in Tin Pan Alley and the Brill Building, the row served as the city’s hub for musical performers and musicians. 2e jazz immortals — Benny Goodman, Lionel Hampton, Charlie Parker, 2elonious Monk — bought and repaired their instruments at the row. Later, the row was descended on by the gods of rock. 2eir chau=eured limousines or Rolls-Royces would glide through the crowds, and a fortunate few might glimpse the extravagantly adorned deities and their maenads as they emerged to browse the shops for a Les Paul guitar, perhaps, or a Fender bass. But at the end of the sixties, most of the shops had been dispersed or shuttered by the same con4uence of economic and cultural forces that had thrust up the glass Midtown towers, in4ated rents, and demolished the dime-a-dance joints, automats, and jazz spots like 2e Onyx Club and

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2e 2ree Deuces. By the time we got to the row, the music was already fading. Only a cluster of the shops had survived. Nevertheless, Forty-eighth Street was still a Jerusalem for pilgrims of every musical sect and cult — Julliard students and bespectacled professors, opera divas, piano- bar performers, sharply suited bluesmen from Chicago, graying Village folkies wearing their old stevedore caps, wedding bands, bar-bands from the outer boroughs — and a sprinkling of cranks and semi-derelicts who wandered in from the once-elegant hotels around Broadway. Sometimes we ran into other gaggles of teenagers, also on pilgrimages after classes and exploring the riches of the row. 2e shops seemed not so much places of business as temples to music. 2eir idols were the greats whose signed, framed photographs lined the walls; their Latin texts were the books of music scores. My friends, astoundingly, were already initiates. 2ey strode boldly through the portals, bandied the Latin with the temple-keepers. 2ey discussed together the comparative virtues of Stratocasters and Gibsons, or types of pickups, and they coaxed thunderous songs from the instruments’ mouths with seemingly supernatural skill. I had no ambition to join my friends’ bands, but I did buy a guitar. My parents warily gave me just enough money for the very cheapest of second-hand guitars, and one day after school, my friends guided me along the row. We eventually unearthed my chosen guitar in what I recall as a murky, cluttered little shop up a long 4ight of creaking wooden stairs. 2e guitar was a “Harmony” brand, a bat- tered acoustic-electric, a wreck dredged up from rock and roll’s earliest epoch — that already faraway, glorious age of

363 T!" G#$% W!& N"'"$ C()" B(*+ (,- O.!"$ E//(0/ the Temptations, Miracles, Angels, and Comets, and the revelatory arrival of the King. 2is relic had somehow been preserved, or perhaps discarded, in this Qumran cave above the row. It was adorned with white dials of African ivory, and with iridescent inlays of mother-of-pearl culled from the depths of the Indian seas, and its curvaceous body was enameled the thrilling scarlet of Sin itself — or so this ruin and its cheap plastic embellishments and knobs appeared to me. When, in the shop, my friends plugged in this artifact and struck some chords — I didn’t yet know how to play — it suddenly roared awake and shook the little room with wild growls and shrieks and lamentations, and it shone in the darkness like the very trumpet of Joshua. I knew, with fear and trembling, that I would have it. I also bought a miniature ampli5er, a packet of strings, and a handful of picks, which sat as colorful as butter4y wings on my palm when I paid at the counter. As I left the shop with the guitar in a black case like those of my friends, I unwittingly joined the long procession of boys who had bought their 5rst instrument on the row. I, too, had become an initiate. I began to improvise with my friends at their apartments. During breaks in their band rehearsals they indulged my fumblings. 2ey taught me to string a guitar, to tune it, to strum with a pick. With their tutoring, I delved further into the Mysteries — how to read notes, how to 5nd the 5ngering for an Elmore James solo and for the barre chords of a rock and roll standard, how to use a capo and a slide. And then, one stormy Saturday afternoon, while playing with a few friends in an apartment on Riverside Drive, I realized that I was, at last, creating music. It was a rapturous

366 I' (,# A.,#. !0 ME.&7 R!C moment: I can see the dim, high-ceilinged, Indian-carpeted living room where the four of us sat playing, lit only by the rain-streaked windows which overlooked the wet green of Riverside Park. I wasn’t especially talented, but I was diligent. I practiced late into the evenings, neglected school work and meals, retreated into monastic solitude in my bedroom. I struggled to learn the peculiar language of musical notation — its cryptic dots, 4ourishes, crescents, and arches — and I endlessly played along with the records I’d bought in shops around the Village and St. Mark’s Place — the 5rst records of my own. At night, I worried the music in my dreams; during the day, while I rode the subway or sat in classrooms, the old songs thrummed and crashed and wailed joyously in my head with their poetry of young love and passion and loss, in an ever-running, jumbled medley — You know she winks like a glowworm, dances like a spinning top, Well you can burn my house, steal my car, keep my liquor in an old fruit jar, Rave on it’s a crazy feeling, and I know it’s a-got me reeling — the lyrics and melodies and harmonies thrilled me, day and night. Although this music had swirled around me since childhood — in movies, on television, at friends’ apartments — only now, in my dawning adolescence, did it suddenly reverberate in some deep place: only now did I hear it. 2e glory of music had been revealed. But I resisted conversion. I still yearned to starve in a Paris garret and paint Impressionistic canvases. 2ose months while I roamed Music Row, I also visited art shops, ostensibly stocking supplies for my twice-weekly studio classes, but really I loved simply browsing. Pearl Paint, on Canal Street, was a temple to the visual arts. Here were

36: T!" G#$% W!& N"'"$ C()" B(*+ (,- O.!"$ E//(0/ instruments of another kind — artists’ instruments: tubes of oil paints, easels, newsprint pads, palette knives, brushes, charcoal sticks, chamois cloths, kneaded erasers, portfolio cases — all enticingly displayed in pristine rows and reg- imented stacks, in stark contrast to the splattery disorder of the school studio. For me — perhaps for all of us — our visits to Music Row were early sorties into the grown-up world. Our rude music drove our often foolish rebellion, but also, paradox- ically, brought new maturity. I was dismayed to 5nd that attaining mere competence, much less mastery, of even rudimentary guitar skills demanded as much dedication as did my drawing studies — required resolute perseverance when my 5ngers ached from weariness and burned from playing on the steel strings, and stubbornly de5ed my will. When I listened to a rock and roll record, or played with my schoolmates, I might hear a chord shift or a casual musical aside that revealed Elysian vistas, and then I’d be left standing slack-jawed in the dust, su=ering yet another humbling. But by persevering, by overcoming such dimin- ishments, by committing to a thing greater than oneself, one rose further toward adulthood — even if sometimes, like Eddie Cochran, I felt that all that climbing was getting me down. 2at winter, my bouts with music and my visits to Music Row were, in ways I couldn’t have suspected, lifting me out of childhood.

S! ;%'+ +#%$. ,%/ 8%..#/ since those visits to the row, I hadn’t anticipated that my arrival with Jonathan would plunge me back into adolescence. I hadn’t even bothered to

36< I' (,# A.,#. !0 ME.&7 R!C tell Jonathan, except for a few words in passing, of that long ago time. But as we paused at the entrance to the instrument room, the forgotten images rose up — the butter4ies in my hand, the Times Square marquees glimpsed over a friend’s shoulder, the rainy windows of the apartment on Riverside Drive, the scarlet Harmony guitar shining in the shop’s gloom. I was seeing, simultaneously, the pictures 4ashing within, and the room before me, preserved perfectly through the decades, as though waiting for me to return. I felt as I would if I were to revisit my boyhood bedroom and 5nd it unchanged: a 4ood of warmth, but mingled with the chill of realizing one’s age, of witnessing one’s many selves warily confronting each other as strangers. For in an inchoate way I knew that I had returned to this room as a stranger. I had allowed my hard-won intimacy with music to slip away, as I had, too, with painting. I hadn’t struggled with the musical notes for half a lifetime; I had abandoned my Harmony relic to a housemate when I left college. Now, the instruments crowding this room were as unfamiliar to me as old nautical instruments — they might as well have been sextants, calipers, astrolabes. As I stood at the open door, amid this assault by memory, I vaguely remembered Jonathan. It was as though I’d left my son alone on a distant shore. I turned and saw he was deep in his own, quite di=erent, wonderment. He was a few crucial years younger than I was when I found the row, was not yet grappling with adolescence. For his age he was tall, but he looked like I did at twelve: a lot of light curls, fair skin, and large eyes, which were now wide and staring. Our separate reveries were intruded upon by a cheery greeting from a young saleswoman who was approaching.

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She wore jeans and a sweater and had a Mediterranean complexion and thick dark hair, tied back. I struggled to fully return to the present, tried to explain, clumsily, that we were shopping for a saxophone for my son, to replace his school instrument. “We want to buy him — my son — a — horn —” “Not a horn, dad,” Jonathan scolded me, embarrassed. “A woodwind. A saxophone is a woodwind.” 2e saleswoman smiled at me empathetically at my son’s rebuke. “Are you looking for a student model or a professional model?” She asked. We decided to try the student model. She then asked Jonathan a brisk series of questions, which he just as briskly answered: “What type of sax do you play? Alto?” “Tenor.” “What reed do you use? We have a three —” “Two and a half.” “Do you know how to put on the ligature?” “Yes.” “What tuning are you in —?” “I play a B 4at.” 2e saleswoman nodded matter-of-factly at this information and led us into the instrument room, then went through another door to get a mouthpiece and reed. I had tried to help Jonathan answer her questions but couldn’t 5nd my voice, as though I were drugged. Jonathan, however, clearly hadn’t needed my intervention. His answers were surprisingly assured. I could tell, even through my miasmic condition, that he and the saleswoman were conversing at ease, not as an adult to a boy, but as one

36? I' (,# A.,#. !0 ME.&7 R!C musician to another. 2ey were leveled, as everyone here was, by the music, and joined by it. And it was borne in on me that during Jonathan’s last year or so of study he had advanced more deeply than I’d noticed into the intricacies of music. I’d heard him practicing in our apartment — or rather, I’d half-heard him, for usually I was busy with one thing or another. At 5rst, the notes blatted out like elephant sneezes or dinosaur mating calls. But he began to work out simple songs, then attacked more sophisticated standards — “2e Tennessee Waltz,” “Autumn Leaves,” “Take the A Train.” He ran through his exercises earnestly. Sometimes, I’d see him in his room, cleaning his abused old instrument lovingly with a cloth, or I’d see him take a bowl from the cupboard to bathe the delicate, pale mouthpiece-reeds in lukewarm water for some purpose inscrutable to me. He had developed a real ardor for music while I’d been preoccupied elsewhere. 2e saleswoman returned and gave him a mouthpiece, ligature, and reed, then brought over a brass-plated student sax. Jonathan sat on a chair, and in a businesslike way he slid the reed on the mouthpiece, 5tted the ligature into place, and tightened the screws. 2en he pressed the mouthpiece into the cork-lined neck of the instrument and with his lips, moistened the reed. He blew tentatively, birthing a thin, high wail. He stopped, assumed an expression of concentration, and blew again, and this time, the music came, a startlingly clear cascade of notes, a Gershwin sort of ri=, mingling jazz and classical. I watched Jonathan’s small, quick 5ngers working the keys, as the notes leapt and skipped. He stopped.

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2e saleswoman asked him: “What do you think?” Jonathan nodded thoughtfully. “Let me get you the professional model,” she said. “It’s more expensive, but it’s a better instrument.” She went behind a counter, gingerly lifted a silvery saxophone from a wall rack. Elaborate 4oral engravings raced down the body like silver 4ames. Jonathan’s eyes widened slightly when she presented this marvel. He unhooked the student sax from the shoulder strap and handed it to me. As I reached for it, he again rep- rimanded: “Don’t hold it by the neck!” And the saleswoman again smiled at me, and I felt embarrassed, like a du=er, an alien in this place. Jonathan fastened the shoulder strap to the professional instrument, took a deep breath, and his eyes closed and he played a few notes — played them con5dently but not 4ashily, with focus, listening — and then he stopped and lowered the sax and looked at the saleswoman and then at me, and a smile rose on his lips, a sort of beati5c smile, a musician’s listening smile, and he murmured, “that’s nice.” “Yes, that’s a good instrument,” the saleswoman agreed. Jonathan played some more, and his pleasure was all over his intent face. “It has a nice action, doesn’t it?” the saleswoman asked, when he paused. Jonathan again nodded, dreamily, still hearing the notes. He decided to try the student sax again, but it was plainly not as good to his ear. “It’s just not the same, is it?” the saleswoman said. “No.”

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After more trials of both instruments, and questions of the saleswoman, Jonathan said he wanted to buy the professional sax. It was signi5cantly more expensive than the student model. We had a sensible discussion. Jonathan’s expression was thoughtful, and I felt as though I was speaking with a serious young musician, a young man. I agreed that I would buy the professional model for him. Jonathan looked up at me and smiled broadly, then. And I could see in his luminous gaze that the music now was lifting him, as it once had lifted me.

2014

36B Two Left Hands Concerning a certain minority

hen I help my daughter with her homework W lately, I sometimes 5nd myself thinking of poor Mary Barker. Mary was among the Puritan girls in the Massachusetts Bay Colony who were swept up in the Salem witchcraft trials of the late seventeenth century. I know little about Mary beyond that she was thirteen years old when she was arrested for practicing witchcraft, that she was among the fortunate who were acquitted, and that the tribunal noted she had confessed to having made her “mark” in the “Divels book” with her left hand. 2is last fact — Mary’s use of her left hand to make her mark — particularly returns to me, for it may well have served as evidence of her guilt: among Christians, it was common knowledge that the left hand was favored by Satan and his witches. I think of Mary Barker not because I suspect my daughter is witch — although she does have an uncanny ability to vanish at will and to summon unholy chaos in her bedroom — I think of her because my daughter is left- handed. And I thank God that she wasn’t born into Mary Barker’s seventeenth-century Salem.

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Katie is a twenty-5rst-century Manhattanite. She is eight years old and has been learning cursive script at school. Evenings, she traces her letters at our dining room table. And when I help her, we enjoy watching my adult hand mirroring the movements of her child’s hand, for I, too, am left-handed. I notice that her letters, like mine, tend to either march perfectly upright across the page or even lean backward. 2is failure to form letters with the ideal rightward slant is, or was, when cursive was more widely taught, a betraying sign of the left-handed writer. 2e ink smears she leaves on the page also are typical among lefties, whose hands often trail behind the forming words. Katie’s teacher, a young woman knowledgeable about current education principles and practices, has not discussed Katie’s left-handedness with her and tells me that a child’s hand preference is no longer of concern among teachers. Katie says that at school her right-handed neighbors nudge away her left arm when it bumps them as they write, sometimes with a glance of annoyance, but that is the only trouble it brings. I’m glad, because I feel that I am responsible, if unwittingly, for her left-handedness. Katie has inherited her mother’s rich-brown eyes and a hint of her Mediterranean complexion, but she alone in our family shares my leftward inclination: her brother and mother are right-handed. So Katie and I enjoy our mutual preference, as I once did with my brother. It’s the uniting bond among lefties in a world of right-handers. Katie is unaware, as I was at her age, of the ancient fear and loathing of our minority among most peoples of the Earth, and of the su=ering in4icted on earlier generations of left-handed children by teachers in American classrooms.

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As a father, though, that history sometimes returns to me when I see Katie writing at our dining room table, a little girl with an earnest expression, her child’s legs dangling from her chair, her left hand gripping her wayward pen as though it were a struggling creature; and it’s then that Mary Barker may appear to me. I picture her as a dark- haired girl, very much like Katie, a sort of double, or twin, in Puritan bonnet and waistcoat, trembling in candlelight before a panel of those 4inty Puritan judges of popular image, arrayed in their weird, tall black hats and somber garments. And I see Mary Barker’s Salem, with its rude, muddy lanes, its whipping post and scarlet letters, its superstitions, intolerance, and Gallows Hill. All of that passed long ago; yet these two girls’ worlds — one a rustic, pious settlement in a wilderness, the other a cosmopolitan island of glass towers — can appear, when reviewing the history of left-handedness, as unnervingly close, separated by only a few enlightened generations and a few New England towns.

M+ #1#;#'(%$+ .7,!!1, in Greenwich Village, was housed in the sort of grim Victorian hulk once typical of New York City public schools. Inside were long, dark, high-ceilinged halls, and endless dark stairs, and odd doors leading to forgotten storage rooms. 2ere were engraved brass doorknobs, and high transoms, and great milk-glass lights hanging from chains, and narrow old porcelain urinals in the ghostly boys’ bathrooms. 2e teachers adjusted the windows using worn, wooden poles tipped with black iron hooks (which always reminded me of the harpoons that sailors 4ung at whales in engravings in my picture book about ships and the sea).

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My 5rst morning at the school, in September 1970, was also the 5rst morning that the building was again opened for children after years locked in shadowed silence. 2e corridors had been invaded by a band of shaggy-haired, bead-wearing teachers, disciples of the sixties’ far-out educational theories. 2ey were like joyous peasant revolutionaries luxuriating in a palace after a coup. 2e school was suddenly bursting with benevolent anarchy, to nurture the blessed uniqueness of each dirty- faced Village hippy child. When we weren’t running wild, we sat for lessons at communal tables scattered about the rooms: the rows of wooden writing desks, the emblem of bygone school regimentation, had been gleefully torn out. I remember listening to lessons while gazing idly at the holes in the 4oor planks, spaced at regular intervals, where bolts had once fastened the desks’ wrought-iron legs. And junked along with those desks was the entire oppressive past of American pedagogy. As one result, left- handed children were not forced, as earlier generations in the school no doubt had been forced, to form cursive letters with the right hand. Our teachers’ acceptance of left-handedness among their pupils was also partly a result of the radical, and quite recent, change in the West’s negative view of the trait. 2is change reached into my class one day when my 5rst-grade teacher remarked with surprise that I was left handed, an observation which alarmed me. She reassured me with a kind smile that the trait was “very special” and meant that I was “creative.” I suddenly felt quite special indeed, and that’s probably why this slight incident remains vivid in memory. But I also know that such an encounter would

3:: T!" G#$% W!& N"'"$ C()" B(*+ (,- O.!"$ E//(0/ have been unthinkable in any American school only a few decades earlier. Having spent my formative years in a Victorian remnant, I could well imagine the physical atmosphere of public schools in American cities of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. What I couldn’t quite imagine — what I couldn’t quite believe — was the old pedagogic atmosphere, as brought down to us in novels, photographs, and movies — the sanc- timoniousness and rigidity, the condescension and ghastly brutality. It was the stu= of gothic 5ction, of Jane Eyre at Lowood. My school’s gentle, chaotic 4ower-child milieu made that history so remote as to be implausible. It was like the Japanese practice of binding the feet of girls — one read that it was a historical fact, but shrank from the idea that such cultural insanity could have existed. Yet a glance at the old educational and scienti5c literature — periodicals and books, newspaper and magazine articles — con5rms one’s fears. Children, and particularly left-handed children, were treated in a manner shocking to us today. Lefties did have their left hands tied with rope behind their backs; they did have their knuckles hit with rulers; they were disgraced and humiliated by teachers and relatives. 2e classroom still bore strong traces of its distant ancestor, the one-room schoolhouse of Mary Barker’s Puritan Massachusetts, with its whipping rod and dunce cap. (“Better whipped than damned,” the Reverend Cotton Mather advised Puritan parents of misbehaving children.) Contemporary accounts of the treatment of left- handers at schools, though usually o=ered by progressive educators urging reform, are nevertheless convincing, and often poignant. In a 1933 article in the Journal of

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Genetic Psychology titled “Shall the Left-Handed Child be Transferred?” the author, C.E. Lauterbach, a professor of education at West Virginia Wesleyan College, presented a long inventory of torments imposed on left-handed children to force them to switch, or “transfer,” their writing hand: cu9ng, slapping, spanking, whipping, boxing ears, cracking knuckles with a ruler, ridiculing, scolding, threatening, and “con5ning in the closet.” Only a rack and breaking wheel were absent from this Tower of London approach to education. 2ree decades earlier, William Hawley Smith, an author, lecturer, and teacher, had also described the punishment of left-handed students, for School and Home Education magazine, in a 1903 article titled “Concerning a Certain Minority”:

For the most part, school teachers feel that it is their duty to compel left-handed children to at least write with their right hands, and many of them go to great lengths of discipline to attain such a result. I have found many instances in which they have tied up the left hand of the pupil during a writing exercise and it is a very common thing for them to “whack” such children over the knuckles if they catch them writing with the left hand. If you doubt this, ask the 5rst left-handed person you come across about his or her experience in school, and see what answer you get. Sometimes these “whacks” are of great severity. I know a young woman who has two small lumps on the back of her left hand which were caused by a “whack” of this sort. 2e blow was made with a “ruler,” and it broke the bones of two of her 5ngers in the body of her hand and they were left to grow together as best they could. But in spite of it all, this young woman writes with her left hand... In some of the large cities the attempt is no longer made to compel left-handed children to use their right

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hands. But in almost all country schools, in towns that employ from two to twenty teachers, the practice of forcing left-handed children to at least write with the right hand is still in good and regular standing.

Such accounts raise the question: what peculiar convergence of cultural and historical factors drove American teachers to so abhor left-handedness that they would bind, beat, and threaten other peoples’ children in order to rescue them from the trait? Certainly the whipping rod was once considered a legitimate means to eradicate not only moral transgressions, like theft, but also bad habits, like smoking, and character 4aws, like impertinence and laziness. Left-handedness, at least super5cially, was regarded as some combination of these evils. Moreover, left-handedness was a practical impediment in a world where about 90 percent of the population was right-handed: mass-produced products, such as scissors and can openers, were designed — as they still are — for right-handed use. Lefty children were to be “retrained,” by force if necessary, for their own bene5t. And retraining would improve the child’s penmanship by eliminating the left-hander’s back-slanting letters and ink smears. Austin Norman Palmer, whose Palmer Method of writing was the preeminent penmanship course in the United States in the early twentieth century, urged teachers to retrain left-handers on grounds of both practicality and character building: “A child who has been taught that he cannot change and who 5nally learns di=erently and does change has strengthened his will power as well as increased his writing e9ciency.” Palmer, for better or worse — it’s hard

3:? TC! L#0( H%'/. to know which — did not specify how to retrain students, leaving teachers to their own devices. 2e Palmer Method, largely forgotten today, emerged as a cultural phenomenon of the Progressive Era. In 1894, Palmer, a 34-year-old teacher of penmanship from New England — a genial-looking man with round, rimless glasses and dark hair parted through the middle — published Palmer’s Guide to Business Writing, and his method was launched. From the vantage-point of the twenty-5rst century, Palmer appears as a sort of mad-professor of penmanship with good intentions; but as so often happens, good intentions paved the way toward a very di=erent direction than that which was sought. As a result of his method, and the vehemence with which it was often applied, Palmer might have caused more physical and emotional misery to children, particularly left-handed children, than any other person in the history of the United States. When Palmer died, in 1927, more than 25 million young Americans had been taught penmanship by his method, according to a widely cited estimate. About 10 percent, or 2.5 million children, would have been left- handers, and perhaps as many as two-thirds of them would have been retrained to use their right hands (a 1929 study by Dr. Ralph Haefner of Columbia University determined that two-thirds of left-handers in American schools were retrained). 2e possibility that more than one million children taught by the Palmer Method were forced — often by physical punishments — to use their right hand is troubling to contemplate. Palmer Method script does have an undeniably simple, elegant line, but mastery demanded nearly the same dedi-

3:@ T!" G#$% W!& N"'"$ C()" B(*+ (,- O.!"$ E//(0/ cation that’s required to execute a perfect Chopin étude on the piano or a triple axel in 5gure skating — a labor that appears absurd from our time. In Palmer’s day, though, proper penmanship was at the core of a child’s schooling, alongside reading and arithmetic. Palmer’s great insight — and it was a monumental one in a country where businesses relied on legions of secre- taries, clerks, bookkeepers, and accountants, all writing by hand — was that both the styles of cursive writing and the methods of teaching penmanship had become obsolete. 2e ornate Spencerian script, which had been a principal style since before the Civil War, was a hindrance to modern, harried workers. Palmer o=ered a streamlined style and a “scienti5c” method of teaching of penmanship, to align both with an increasingly fast-paced workplace. Palmer’s method coincided with the Progressive Era’s embrace of scienti5c advances and practical education, and with the “second machine age” of the late nineteenth century, during which assembly lines and mass production inspired widespread awe and optimism. And in a rather horrifying way, Palmer envisioned each child as a little “writing machine.” He advised teachers: “Learn to run the writing machine.…2e arm is the machine, and the engine that moves it is above the elbow.” He also remarked: “2e copy-book has but one purpose — to secure absolute mechanical accuracy.” Despite Palmer’s claim that mastery would lead students to “the possibility of developing their own individuality,” this hardly seems the point. To achieve this Ovidian metamorphosis of the child into a writing machine, Palmer applied his “muscular movement” technique, so-called because it emphasized use of the whole

3:A TC! L#0( H%'/. arm, rather than the 5ngers and wrist, to form letters. 2e technique required endless drills, such as drawing straight lines (called “push-pulls”) and ovals, with the minutest aspects of the shapes speci5ed. 2e method dictated not only how the pen was held, but also posture, placement of the feet, even the set of one’s head. Instruction books presented an abundance of etchings — some resembled illustrations of higher geometry — and emphasized writing as a physiological process: when the intricacies were mastered, no thought would be needed. 2e Palmer Method did have far-sighted critics, who contended that its burdens outweighed its bene5ts; but the method, according to Palmer’s own story, quickly caught on, 5rst among parochial school teachers, later in public schools. 2e A. N. Palmer Co. would sprout o9ces around the country, publish magazines and books, and o=er correspondence and classroom instruction courses. Recollections by those subjected to the rigors of the Palmer Method reveal a deep bitterness, although the memories of some were softened by time and recounted with wry amusement. In a 1954 article in #e American Mercury titled “Curse You, Palmer!” author Jackson W. Granholm told of a red-haired girl called “Brick” who met with woe when she tried to doctor her penmanship drills by erasing mistakes:

2e red-haired girl who sat next to me in the third grade became so engrossed in this operation one day that she failed to notice Miss Tanner’s stealthy approach. 2e resulting hefty whack across the knuckles startled the whole class. In addition, Brick stood in the cloak room for half an hour, which punishment was, at least, a pleasant relief from that session with the Palmer Method.

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Another writer, however — the bestselling novelist Howard Fast, who was left-handed and was taught the Palmer Method in New York City public schools — expressed still-smoldering anger in a memoir, Being Red:

In the 1920s there was no concept in the American educational system of the proper treatment and education of left-handed children. We were taught to write through a grotesque system of whole-arm movement called the Palmer Method. For a right-handed child it was di9cult enough; for a left-handed child forced to write with his right hand, it was impossible. My writing was a jumbled, unreadable scrawl, and the result was that during my 5rst two years in grade school, I was regarded as just a tri4e better than a moron.

A tri!e better than a moron. As Fast gleaned from experience, the Palmer Method, combined with forced use of the right hand, could work in reverse, eroding a child’s self-esteem as well as penmanship skills. Children like Fast couldn’t have known that they were at the center of a trans-Atlantic argument over retraining which by the 1920s had drawn in scientists, psychiatrists, physicians, social scientists, and educators. 2e dispute, though often couched in modern scienti5c terms, was in essence little changed from its ancient origins, in the dawn of Western philosophy and science: hand-preference was among the points of disagreement between Plato and Aristotle. In #e Parts of Animals, Aristotle had concluded that the right was generally “nobler” than the left, and that left-handedness was 5xed congenitally because the trait was caused by inferior blood 4owing toward the left side

3<3 T!" G#$% W!& N"'"$ C()" B(*+ (,- O.!"$ E//(0/ eighteenth-century world map, the English cartographer John Senex simply wrote across the center of Africa, in what was then “Ethiopia”: “2is Country is wholly unknown to the Europeans.” Early scientists might have written a similar note on drawings of the human brain. Anatomical inquiries into the body — rather than the brain — would be the basis for a group of related early scienti5c theories on hand preference which held that left-handedness was abnormal. 2e “visceral” theories of hand preference posited that the body was structurally skewed toward the right side: the major organs, or viscera, were asymmetrically arranged toward the right within the abdomen; the organs and bones were heavier on the right side; blood and oxygen 4owed more freely toward the right, and so on. And the body’s ten- dency to favor the right implied that right-handedness was simply of a piece with this general and natural inclination. 2e visceral theories clearly harked back to Aristotle’s blood-circulation views. One version of visceral theory was o=ered by a professor of physiology at the University of Glasgow, Andrew Buchanan. In an 1862 paper titled “Mechanical 2eory of Predominance of the Right Hand Over the Left,” Buchanan explained that right-handedness was caused by the “mechanical” structure of the body during exertion: strenuous activity prompted deep inha- lation; expansion of the lungs shifted the center of gravity away from the right side, facilitating use of the right arm rather than the left. Buchanan proclaimed that such was the universal human norm:

If the barbarians who tatoo their faces, compress their skulls, distort their feet, and otherwise mutilate and dis5gure the human frame, are, nevertheless, all

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of them just as unanimous as civilized nations in the preference of the right hand over the left, we may rest assured that it is not a mere matter of choice on their part, which hand they ought to prefer.

Buchanan’s implication was that left-handers — presumably including the left-handed o9ce workers, factory laborers, and middle-class families he passed on Glasgow’s streets — were less “normal” than the “barbarians” of the remote wastes of the earth. Buchanan, and other advocates of visceral theory, were writing amid the locomotive and telegraph, and world-changing medical advances, such as Pasteur’s germ theory, Lister’s use of antiseptics, and the cell theory of 2eodor Schwann and Matthias Schleiden; yet they were relying on beliefs little changed from Classical Greece, ideas as scienti5cally baseless as those that held the body was composed of humors or that bloodletting by leeches cured most illnesses. 2e visceral theory of left-handedness was a tendril of ancient medicine extending into the industrial and scienti5c revolutions of the nineteenth century.

BE( %( (,# .%;# ,&.(!$&7%1 ;!;#'( that Buchanan and others were promoting visceral theory, a golden age of brain exploration was beginning in France. Within a few years, the new, empirical research of neuropsychology would drive investigation of handedness into the modern era by relocating the source of hand preference from the abdomen and poor blood circulation to the structure of the brain. In 1861, Pierre Paul Broca, a prominent Paris surgeon, discovered, through experiments on a patient su=ering from

3<: T!" G#$% W!& N"'"$ C()" B(*+ (,- O.!"$ E//(0/ aphasia, that a certain area of the brain’s left frontal lobe controlled his ability to speak. 2is was a medical mile- stone because it showed that the brain does not function holistically, as was widely thought, but instead is asymmet- rical, or “lateralized,” with each hemisphere controlling certain neurological activities; moreover, it showed that each hemisphere contains areas that govern certain tasks, a neurological arrangement known as localization. Four years later, Broca went further: the dominant hand, he said, is connected with the speech center in the brain’s opposite hemisphere. Broca’s observations about lateralization and localization, like the later arguments for and against switching children’s hand-preference, were not entirely new. Plato’s older contemporary Hippocrates had seen that an injury to one side of the brain could a=ect the opposite side of the body, and he also suggested that the two halves of the brain could function independently. In the early nineteenth century, a German physician, Franz Joseph Gall, had posited a rudimentary theory of brain localization in his “science” of phrenology. Phrenology, which became a popular belief in Europe and America, identi5ed within the brain more than two dozen regions, each devoted to a single faculty, such as Friendship, Propriety, Circumspection, and Religion. Gall mapped these regions, providing each with a black border, like so many countries within the Africa of the mind. An individual’s propensities were re4ected by the size of each region, which formed the contours of the brain and the skull; examination of the skull’s shape would divulge a person’s character. Others in the early nineteenth century, including one of Gall’s students, Jean-Baptiste Bouillaud

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(who was also an advocate of bloodletting), had reached conclusions similar to those of Broca. What was new in Broca’s 5ndings was their speci5city and their conclusive empirical presentation. Broca’s discoveries spilled into the rich brew of scienti5c and pseudo-scienti5c theories that were swirling throughout Europe and America in the second half of the nineteenth century — Gall’s phrenology, social Darwinism, visceral theory, eugenic engineering, Mendelian inheritance theory, and Bénédict Morel’s degeneration theory, which claimed that 4awed heredity predisposed certain people to physical and mental illness, and worsened over generations. At the turn of the twentieth century, Cesare Lombroso incorporated ideas from many of these theories for an explanation of hand preference that received wide attention. Although Buchanan and other visceral theorists had characterized left-handers as not “normal,” they had not gone so far as to explicitly say that hand preference indicated inbred dangerous and primitive mental tendencies. Lombroso did. In 1903, Lombroso expounded his hypothesis in a brief article with the deceptively bland title of “Left-Handedness and Left-sidedness” for the prestigious North American Review. In statements now infamous in the literature on left-handedness, Lombroso declared that the trait was “ordinarily found among women, children, and savages,” that left-handers were often “lunatics,” and that they were “more numerous in ages past than they are now” thanks to evolutionary progress: “As man advances in civilization and culture, he shows an always greater right-sidedness as compared to savages.” Criminals and mental “defectives”

3<> T!" G#$% W!& N"'"$ C()" B(*+ (,- O.!"$ E//(0/ carried inherited, unalterable “atavistic” qualities and could be identi5ed by their physiognomy — left-handedness was often evidence of these primitive traits. Apparently mingling the insights of Aristotle, visceral theorists, and Broca, Lombroso attributed left-handedness to de5cient blood 4ow to the brain’s left hemisphere, which controls the right side of the body. He concluded: “I do not dream at all of saying that all left-handed people are wicked, but that left-handedness, united to many other traits, may contribute to form one of the worst characters among the human species.” Lombroso’s article received criticism but also support. In a 1913 issue of McClure’s Magazine, a New England scientist and educator, Edwin Tenney Brewster, citing Lombroso’s authority, opined, in another now-notorious statement, that left-handedness was “slightly more common, in the lower strata of society than in the higher, among negroes than among white persons, and among savages than among civilized persons.” He added, echoing Lombroso:

there is a disproportionate number of left-handed adults among criminals, insane persons, imbeciles, epileptics, vagrants, and social failures of various sorts. All these unfortunate beings have something the matter with them; and that something is, in most cases, congenital and beyond all hope of avoidance or reform.

Both Lombroso and Brewster, like the visceral theorists, were convinced that left-handers were inherently incapable of adjusting properly to the use of the right hand. 2e implications of such permanent disability led, perhaps inevitably, toward eugenics, the movement which emerged in Europe

A sound and capable stock, like a right-handed one, breeds true, generation after generation. 2en something slips a cog, and there appears a left-handed child, a black sheep, or an imbecile. An imbecile or scapegrace parent married to a normal spouse may have half his children like himself. Two weak-minded, criminal, or degenerate parents always have all their children bad.

In Eugenical News, Dr. Alfred Gordon, in a 1932 article titled, “Family Stock Betterment with Response to Left Handedness,” described the trait as “abnormal” and advocated eliminating it through eugenic marriages, which would pair partners based on genetic science. He remarked:

Improvements in the hereditary foundations of human family-stocks are feasible, when one considers the fundamental improvement of animals under skillful

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selection and mating, and thus a gradual elimination of undesirable characteristic-units will be obtained.

Among those who had challenged the genetic determinist views of Lombroso and eugenicists was a French social anthropologist, Robert Hertz. Hertz, like Plato, categorized hand-preference as a product of nurture rather than nature, and he, too, embraced the ideal of ambidexterity. In 1909, Hertz published “2e Pre-Eminence of the Right Hand: A Study in Religious Polarity,” in which he noted: “To the right hand go honours, 4attering designa- tions, prerogatives: it acts, orders, and takes. 2e left hand, on the contrary, is despised and reduced to the role of a humble auxiliary.” Hertz acknowledged the discoveries of neuroscience but denied that they proved hand-preference was stamped inexorably at birth and that left-handedness was necessarily indicative of character 4aws or physical in5rmities. For most people, brain laterality, and therefore hand-preference, created merely a “vague disposition” which would be responsive to modi5cation by training. How- ever, age-old cultural and religious beliefs had linked right and left with “the sacred and the profane,” and prevented encouragement of the use of the left hand: “For centuries the systematic paralysation of the left arm has, like other mutilations, expressed the will animating man to make the sacred predominate over the profane,” Hertz concluded. He thought that scientists such as Lombroso were twisting sci- enti5c method to justify those enduring beliefs (Lombroso had noted the traditional distrust of left-handers among Italians in three provinces as corroborating evidence of his conclusions). Humanity, if freed from outmoded prejudices,

15:6, “2y right hand O LORD, is glorious in power”; and again, in Psalm 118: “2e right hand of the LORD is exalted: the right hand of the LORD doeth valiantly.” 2e New Testament seats Jesus at the right hand of God, with the left relegated to the realm of Satan. In Matthew, Ch. 25, we are told that Jesus, on the Day of Judgment, will send the blessed sheep to his right, but the goats would be sent to his left, and damnation: “shall he say also unto them on the left hand, Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting 5re, prepared for the devil and his angels.” (Herman Melville, in Moby Dick, wrote that a whaling ship’s try-works — the furnace for rendering oil from blubber — “smells like the left wing of the day of judgment.”) 2e English word “right” has long meant the good, correct, just, and straight. 2e West’s aversion to the left eventually led to the 5rst known witchcraft prosecution in the New World. In 1626, in Jamestown, a left-handed midwife, Joane Wright, was accused of using black magic. A pregnant woman had rejected Wright as a midwife because of her left-handedness. 2e pregnant woman’s husband told an investigating council that Wright was “very much discontented” by the rebu=, and soon afterward he and his wife were struck ill and their child endured “extreme payne” and died at 5ve weeks. Neighbors said that Wright accurately predicted the deaths of several people, struck dead some chickens after their owner refused to sell them to her, and threatened a maid that she would make her “daunce starke naked.” We have no record of Wright’s fate — but we do know that of another who was accused of witchcraft: Mary Barker. 2e Salem court documents preserve for us how Mary

3>D TC! L#0( H%'/. pledged her devotion to the Evil One: “She made a Red Mark in the Divels book w’th the fore5nger of her Left hand.” 2e red mark may have been made with human or animal blood. However, the fragmentary records don’t tell us whether Mary’s use of her left hand to make her mark was her own preference or that of Satan, or whether the fact served as prosecutorial evidence. But the odd speci5city of this detail indicates to me that it was considered a noteworthy point, potentially wielded against Mary — particularly when we recall that in the Puritans’ former homeland, England, as across Europe, the left was reviled as the dominion of Satan and his witches. Ben Jonson, in his Masque of Queenes (1609), describes a witches’ Sabbath in which the hags circle backward, toward the left; and in 1589, in the English town of Chelmsford, a woman named Joan Prentice, or Prentiss, was hanged as a witch after it was recorded that, among other things, the devil, in the form of a ferret, sucked the blood from the “fore5nger of her left hand.” For Mary, at age thirteen, death by hanging, as might have befallen Joane Wright, was a real possibility: nineteen people, of the one hundred and 5fty or so men, women, and children arrested in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, were hanged for witchcraft by the time the hysteria subsided, in May 1693. 2e documents for August 29, 1692, recount that Mary told the three magistrates “ther was Such a load & weight at her Stomack that Hindred her from Speaking & is afrayd She has Given up herself Soul & body to 2e Divel…” More than three centuries later, we have preserved for us the panicked words of a thirteen-year-old girl accused of witchcraft on a summer day in New England.

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Mary Barker languished for six weeks in Salem’s 5lthy jail, crowded with others accused of witchcraft, before she was acquitted, in January 1693. Afterward, she lived a long life in Massachusetts. She married at age twenty, and died at age seventy-three, in 1752. No doubt the memory of her ordeal shadowed Mary Barker to the grave.

I0 S%1#;’. .(%E'7, KE/)#. *%((1#/ S%(%' with the gallows, sharp-eyed nuns later smote him with the ferule. In American parochial schools, well into the twentieth century, ruler-wielding sisters struck students who wrote with “the Devil’s hand.” In public schools, a combination of well-meant pragmatism, new scienti5c and psychological theories, old religious and cultural biases, and Victorian notions of pedagogy, created a toxic environment for generations of left-handed children. (Rather surprisingly, in nineteenth century England, even William Wordsworth — poet of the joys of unfettered rural childhood and critic of the strictures imposed by modern life — allowed his young daughter Catherine to have her left arm tied behind her in an e=ort to “cure” her left-handedness.) Signi5cant change in both the teaching of penmanship and the public’s attitude toward hand preference would not arrive until the postwar era, when liberal arguments about schooling and child-rearing began to gain wide acceptance, after decades of advocacy by educators (“Let Left-Handedness Alone!” was the title of a 1917 article in Illustrated World magazine by a doctor, J.J. Turrell). 2e emphasis in classrooms 5nally shifted from Palmer’s machine-like repetition and from corporal punishment toward fostering the child’s creativity

3>6 TC! L#0( H%'/. and individuality. To encourage children to learn to write at a younger age and to express themselves, teachers delayed or abandoned use of the Palmer Method for less rigorous approaches, and adopted simpler styles of cursive. Retraining, too, waned. Nevertheless, even in the mid-1940s, the former chief psychiatrist of the New York City Board of Education, Abram Blau, himself a former left-hander, was clinging to the idea that left-handedness was in part “an expression of infantile negativism” and that children should be retrained because “the alleged dangers of retraining are non-existent.” And as late as 1950 anti-left prejudice would surface in popular culture, in the Hollywood 5lm #e Asphalt Jungle, in which a lawyer re4ects on his corruption with the remark: “After all, crime is only a left-handed form of human endeavor.”

B+ (,# #'/ !0 (,# .&L(&#., the Palmer Method was disappearing from classrooms; in the eighties, the A.N. Palmer Co. closed. Skilled cursive penmanship, once at the core of a child’s education and prized as a graceful accomplishment or as a crucial skill for entry into a white- collar profession, was becoming, in the computer age, as old-fashioned as the fountain pen. Meanwhile, research into the causes and implications of hand-dominance was bringing both new insights and new questions about how the brain functions. An early break- through came from the “split-brain” experiments of Roger Sperry, a professor at the California Institute of Technology who was awarded the Nobel Prize for physiology in 1981.

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Sperry concluded from tests on animals and humans that the brain’s two hemispheres are not only specialized but also nearly independent, with the left side governing speech, abstract and analytical thought, perception of temporal relationships, and the body’s motor systems, while the right side serves as the seat of perception of spatial and auditory relationships and of holistic, intuitive, non-verbal reasoning. In his Nobel Prize presentation speech to Dr. Sperry, Professor David Ottoson of Stockholm’s Karolinska Institutet said: “Today we know from Sperry’s work that the left hemisphere is cool and logical in its thinking, while the right hemisphere is the imaginative, artistically creative half of the brain. Perhaps it is so that in thinkers the left hemisphere is dominant whereas in artists it is the right.” After such a vivid explanation, Sperry’s 5ndings were, predictably, simpli5ed and popularized in books and articles, and they contributed signi5cantly to the waning, after millennia, of the negative Western view of left-handedness. Lefties’ connection, through cross-lateralization, to the brain’s right hemisphere was now a blessed access to the special, artistic half of the brain. Left-handed historical figures — Leonardo Da Vinci, Beethoven, Einstein, Charlie Chaplin — were (and continue to be) celebrated and examined for how their supposed right-brain thinking contributed to their achievements. However, Sperry’s characterization of the brain’s left and right hemispheres has since been subjected to revisionist theories, as has the assumption, since Broca’s time, that left- handers are wired to the right hemisphere for speech; left- handers are now believed to mostly share right-handers’ link for speech to the left hemisphere, throwing into question their

3>< TC! L#0( H%'/. access to a creative, right-sided area of the mind. Another old idea, that lefties are more susceptible than right handers to learning disabilities and to illnesses such as schizophrenia, ADHD, dyslexia, stuttering, and autism, remains controversial. While it seems that the old noxious views about left- handers have been discredited in the West, prejudices remain entrenched in much of the world, such as in parts of Africa, India, and Asia. Immigrants can bring that prejudice to American classrooms. A friend told me that he had visited his left-handed daughter at her kindergarten class, in California, and was shocked when her teacher — a young woman, a Vietnamese immigrant — had insisted in a kindly way that the girl write with her right hand — an insistence with a chilling history. Here in New York, though, for my daughter, being left-handed is only an inconvenience at school. In our more enlightened age, I don’t have to worry that in the classroom she will have her left arm tied behind her in class, or have her knuckles whacked with a ruler, or be con5ned to classroom closet, or, for that matter, be suspected of witchery. She will not read that left-handedness is joined by science to criminality, savagery, and depravity, or be urged into a eugenic marriage. So, as yet, her hand preference doesn’t mean much beyond a smile with me when we write her letters together for her homework. When we do, we enjoy watching our two left hands writing in unison. 2e mysterious trait that separates us from much of the rest of the world, that not so long ago might have brought us shame, injury, or ostracism, today simply brings us a little closer together.

2010

3>> There Used to be a Ballpark Of fan dancers, hog-calling contests, donkey ball, and exploding scoreboards

ast May, I went to my 5rst baseball game in forty years. L It happened by chance. A friend had pressed on me two tickets, which he couldn’t use and had been trying to give away, to a Mets versus Braves game at Citi Field. We had gone for lunch at a restaurant near Wall Street, and afterward, on the sidewalk, he had remembered the tickets and pulled them from his wallet. I thanked him for the o=er but protested that I was not a baseball fan, that, in fact, I hadn’t been to a game in four decades, and that he could surely 5nd someone who would appreciate them. “Well, you have a son, don’t you?” He slapped my shoulder, undeterred. “He’s 5fteen, isn’t he? Perfect! Take him out to the game, then — as a father should!” And with that facetious, theatrical scold, my friend thrust the tickets in my hand and strode away in his navy-blue banker’s suit, glancing back with a wave and a smile. “Enjoy the game!” he called. And so I stood holding baseball tickets for the 5rst time since I was a boy. Had I been a boy, I’d have been ecstatic, for I had a great passion for baseball for several years. 2ose two

3>? T,#$# U.#/ (! *# % B%118%$- narrow, rectangular strips of colored paper, indicating the gate, section, row, and number of one’s seat in the stands, were passes to a boy’s paradise. But that afternoon my immediate thought was of 5nding someone to whom I might give the tickets; my son, despite my friend’s suggestion that he would enjoy the game, didn’t follow baseball. 2e match was set for that evening, my friend had said, and I saw on the tickets that it would start in only a few hours. As it turned out, my son was eager to go. Although he’d been to a few games over the years with schoolmates, it would still be something of a novelty and provide a reprieve from his nightly school work. And within an hour, to my surprise, we were standing in a subway packed with high-spirited baseball fans, rattling out toward Citi Field, in a 5ne, soft, spring twilight. Outside the sooty windows, long, pink-purple clouds glowed in the darkening sky above the tar roofs and water tanks and lacy networks of 5re-escapes. Surrounded in the car by the baseball-chatter of excited boys, some wearing baseball caps and jerseys, a few with leather gloves, I recalled my own boyish, bursting excitement when my stepfather occasionally brought me to the ballpark. I felt a sharpening curiosity to watch my old team play a match from the stands — it might be an entertaining evening, after all. I didn’t realize until later that the ball games I saw at Shea Stadium in the 1970s had become, in certain aspects, as distant as those played in New Jersey’s Elysian Fields in the 1870s.

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2e last time I had seen the out5eld grass and the dirt of the diamond I had a mop of brown hair and was wretchedly in love from afar with a dark-haired girl in my sixth-grade English class; the great Tom Seaver was pitching for the Mets; Gerald Ford was our president; Leonid Brezhnev was president of our Cold War adversary, the Soviet Union; and computers were not yet ruling our lives. 2e world was deep within the twentieth century. 2at May evening when I next rode out to a game, my curls had thinned and grayed; Tom Seaver was long retired; 5ve presidents had come and gone; the Soviet Union had collapsed decades earlier; and computers were ubiquitous. Shea Stadium itself had been demolished, and the Mets had moved to the new Citi Field. We were well into the twenty-5rst century. Forty years was a long time away from the game. At Citi Field, my son and I settled into our seats above third base, and I quickly discovered that the Ballpark had changed as much I and the world had. As the game began, we were assaulted: advertisements and contests blasted away on a giant screen above the out5eld; deafening recorded rock music played. Between innings, young people wearing baseball jerseys threw prizes into a sea of grasping hands in the stands, conjuring bread thrown to Romans at the Colosseum. Yet many of those seated around me were oblivious to the spectacle, bent over their tiny handheld screens, which glowed like spawn of the giant screen in the out5eld. Everyone’s attention was fractured; the game itself seemed weirdly incidental, even irrelevant, to the scene. At 5rst, I was shocked, and absorbed the show in numb wonder, although I noticed that my son took it all in stride. As the innings passed, shock became irritation, then anger,

3>A T,#$# U.#/ (! *# % B%118%$- then outrage, as from a betrayal or theft: 2ey had stolen my game, reduced it to a small part of a spectacle. What had happened to my game while I was away?

T,#+ ,%/ .(!1#' ;+ )%;#. How had such a 5erce, boyish possessiveness about baseball been slumbering within me for four decades, then suddenly awaken and rear up on hind legs, breathing smoke and 5re? And why did I feel a sense of theft? And who had stolen my game, and how, and why? I pondered my intense reaction, which seemed to come from another self, the boy I had been. I thought back. 2e earliest memories around baseball were of playing the game with my elementary-school classmates. We played in the schoolyard at recess, but more signi5cant in memory was how we also played after school each fall and spring. We were a straggling troop of boys, bearing gloves, a hardball, and a bat or two through the crabbed old streets of Greenwich Village toward Washington Square Park. I still remembered the other boys’ names and faces, even their relative skills and weaknesses as players. 2e best of us was Tom, a pale, lank-haired boy, a natural leader, admired by all. And there was a poor sad-eyed kid we called Measles, in the cruel way boys have, with his specs and his pale moon- face, who nearly always struck out and let grounders roll between his legs. 2e rest of us fell somewhere between such athletic extremes. Our 5eld was a patch of scu=ed, beaten grass on the park’s southeast corner. When we arrived, a few of us 4ung down our school bags around the 5eld to serve as bases. We chose sides as boys have probably done since the game

3>B T!" G#$% W!& N"'"$ C()" B(*+ (,- O.!"$ E//(0/ was born, with two captains running their hands up a bat for 5rst choice of teammates. 2ere were such pleasures of the game —- the pleasures which generations of grown men have lovingly recalled — of swinging the bat and feeling the ball strike the heart of the wood, and seeing the white streak 4y up, and the somber upturned face of the pitcher watching it ascend amid the cheers and urgings of teammates (“Run! Run!”), and then the dash to 5rst base, and sometimes a plowing slide into second, which kicked up a burst of dust and left you wonderfully covered in grass and dirt, and occasionally crossing home plate to teammates’ shouts and backslaps, a momentary hero. 2ere was the warm, rough, tribal fellowship which the game engendered among us, even mystically extending back to all the greats, past and present, of the diamond; for we, too, were part of this American tradition. We took our batting stances in imitation of our idols, we mimicked their pitching windups, we disputed their relative merits, citing batting averages and other statistics for authority, like disputatious Bible scholars quoting rival passages of the testaments. 2ose afternoons while we played, the city faded away and our scu=ed little 5eld swelled to encompass our world. We played until the sky darkened to a murky blue and the air cooled and the wind rose, and the park’s lamps came on; then we’d reluctantly pack up our gloves and call out goodbyes, and walk our separate ways home, exhilarated and dusty and tired, leaving our magic 5eld — it had become our 5eld — lying empty in the gathering gloom, awaiting our return the next day. Yes, it all came back. Or rather, it never really leaves, this early love of the game. It seeps into your bones as a boy

3?D T,#$# U.#/ (! *# % B%118%$- and remains, perhaps dormant, the rest of your life — or so I realized at Citi Field, decades after those afternoons in Washington Square Park. But my early love of baseball wasn’t con5ned to playing the game. I devoured books about its history and heroes, which my stepfather bought for me. One volume I recall was a thick hardcover called #e Fireside Book of Baseball, which presented a panorama of the sport with black-and- white photographs. I collected baseball cards. I bought them sometimes on Saturday afternoons at a narrow little junk shop near St. Mark’s Place. 2e shop had old costume jewelry in a grimy glass case, and crates bursting with yellowed magazines and comic books, and shelves of obscure record albums. Lying around were broken radios, 5shing rods without reels, adding machines, old shoes. 2e proprietor, an obese old man with thick glasses and grotesque warts and tufts of gray hair, kept the baseball cards in a box at the back of a forest of dirty coats. 2e place stank of dust, mothballs, the old man’s foul musk. He charged next to nothing for the cards — a quarter, 5fty cents — and I always left clutching ancient treasures. I most prized the very oldest cards, those from before World War I, the small cards found inside cigarette pack- ages. 2ey were from the bygone America of family farms and bustling main streets, of trolley cars rattling out to the ballparks carrying boys in knickers and men wearing derbies and straw hats. 2e cards, to me, held the magic of the Old Ball Game, of old America. With them, I could bring myself back to the game’s early days, when the players were boys fresh from Southern farms, New England factories,

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Pennsylvania coal mines, and the ballpark tiers were strung with bunting, and ladies wore hooped skirts and feathered hats. 2ese bits of cardboard had somehow survived from the era of legends like Ty Cobb, Honus Wagner, Christy Mathewson, and Walter Johnson. When I ran a 5nger over their disintegrating surfaces, I was touching the game’s glorious past itself. Shoeless Joe Jackson was hitting for the White Sox when this card was made…Grover Cleveland Alexander was pitching for the Philadelphia Phillies…Babe Ruth was a rookie southpaw in Boston… 2e early cards were colored lithographs, and I loved their hand-inked lines, their gaudy yet delicate colors: the almost feminine pink blush on the players’ cheeks, the glistening inky-blacks of their leather shoes, the subtle grays of the baggy, cotton jerseys emblazoned with the wonderful names of long-vanished teams — the Brooklyn Tip-Tops, the Boston Beaneaters, the St. Louis Browns. I loved the small, boyish caps and 4imsy leather gloves, the antiquated hairstyles — the grand mustaches and varnished curls. I loved the elaborate lettering on the backs of the cards spelling out the exotic cigarette brands — Sweet Caporal, Sovereign, Old Mill. I would lose myself in the smallest details of the artwork. And of course there was the greatest thrill of all, going out to the ballpark. I went to Shea Stadium with my stepfather. He was a large man, dark-haired, of Mediterranean heritage. A doctor, well read, in many ways brilliant, he nevertheless took an infectious pleasure in the game. He’d been a Brooklyn Dodgers fan growing up in the 5fties, and while he no longer followed baseball, he enjoyed occasionally taking me to a game. He had a

3?6 T,#$# U.#/ (! *# % B%118%$- wonderful gusto: he shouted and stood with the crowd at home runs; he whistled through his 5ngers at the passing vendors and ordered beer for himself and frankfurters for us. He kept box scores with a little blue pencil they handed out, and during lulls in the game, he explained why the out5elders had shifted positions, or such mysteries as how ERAs and batting averages were 5gured out, and eventually I could rattle o= multitudes of ERAs and batting averages and other arcane statistics. As in Washington Square Park, the game became our world for those hours. 2ere were few distractions — an occasional shout or catcall at the players, the cries of roaming hotdog and beer vendors and the bang of their metal tins opening and closing. At an exciting moment, the scene might be enlivened by a bugle call from the scoreboard or by a four-note, jaunty organ tune played to rouse the fans before fading into the expectant silence of thousands, all focused on a duel of pitcher and batter. 2e scene, compared to the near-constant pandemonium of Citi Field, was so di=erent, so spare and quiet, that it seemed a memory from a lost world. What had happened to my game while I was away?

I 0!E'/ ;+.#10 $#(E$'&') (! C&(& F/ and visiting Yankee Stadium; I found myself lea5ng through the sort of baseball books I had prized as a boy; I found myself scouring newspaper articles about the game from the early days to the present, and studying photos and 5lms. I savored the grainy black-and-white newsreels — DiMaggio swatting the ball with his beautiful rangy swing; Babe Ruth rounding the bases with his heavy bulk, trotting with his incongruously

3?: T!" G#$% W!& N"'"$ C()" B(*+ (,- O.!"$ E//(0/ quick baby steps; FDR, with his ebullient grin, throwing out the opening-day ball in 1933, the Mets winning the 1969 World Series. And through all of this, I found myself freshly enjoying the game again, the sweet tense lulls, the rushing, dusty, 4ashing grace of the plays, the yelling crowds rising in unison in the stands, the whole historical sweep. I was reminded why I had loved the game as a boy. I also realized that the transformation of the ballpark experience, which had so shocked and outraged me at Citi Field, had been for decades a topic of impassioned public debate and scholarly research. I felt — it was the unavoidable parallel — like Rip Van Winkle waking after a long sleep to a new world. While Washington Irving’s 5ctional farmer had dozed on a green knoll in the Catskill Mountains for twenty years, through the blasting guns of a political and military revolution — the American Revolution — I had slept through the blasting video screens and rock music of a technological and cultural revolution. 2e advance and proliferation of media technology in recent decades had altered the ballpark experience more than any other force since the birth of the American Ballpark itself. 2e old swaying equipoise between the game in the 5eld and the commercial distractions in the grandstands, in which the game always received slightly more weight, had been tipped the other way. At Citi Field, I had stumbled on the strange, contorted spectacle unleashed by that imbalance. I learned that Citi Field is, in fact, among the more constrained, nostalgia-laden ballparks, with explicit architectural references to the Brooklyn Dodgers’ vanished and beloved Ebbets Field; but this only underscores how

3?< T,#$# U.#/ (! *# % B%118%$- pervasive the changes to the ballpark have been during the last forty years. To understand how we arrived at such a contradictory ballpark as Citi Field — with its pious architectural nostalgia for a simpler time, for the Old Ball Game, while embracing the latest attention-fracturing distractions which negate the game it exalts — it’s worth a glance back at the early days of the Ballpark.

L&-# !(,#$ $#"!1E(&!'. which transformed American culture — rock and roll, Hollywood movies, fast-food chains — the Ballpark was an unanticipated phenomenon, created by unlikely founders, and resulting in unimagined business empires. 2e modern billion-dollar stadium, with its seating capacity for a small city, lights visible from outer space, and a din heard miles away, traces its origin to a single wooden ballpark, in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, built during the Civil War as an after-thought by middle-aged businessman who had nothing whatever to do with baseball. We are so accustomed to ballparks that we hardly think of them as an invention, like Bell’s telephone. But although stadiums and amphitheaters dotted the ancient world, the American baseball park was a distinct creation, by a single man. Rather unfairly, the Father of the Ballpark is little known beyond baseball historians. William Cammeyer was an aFuent leather merchant with a shop on Gold Street, in lower Manhattan. A photograph taken rather late in his life shows an el5sh man with a high forehead and 4eecy gray side-whiskers. As be5tted a wealthy businessman, he presented himself for his portrait

3?> T!" G#$% W!& N"'"$ C()" B(*+ (,- O.!"$ E//(0/ in elegant attire: a starched Gladstone collar, dot rep tie, ornamental tie pin, dark coat. Cammeyer and his wife lived comfortably, with a typi- cally large Victorian brood, and he might well have simply continued to run the business he had inherited from his father. But Cammeyer was ambitious, and he also had behind his respectable façade both a latent showman and a political operator who were yearning to emerge. He was scouting for an opportunity. In 1861, he spotted it, just a short distance from his home — a vacant lot, in the residential neighborhood of south Williamsburg. 2e lot was notable only for its enormity — it was large enough for two modern baseball 5elds. At this point in the story, one is tempted to pause and fashion a mental Currier & Ives image of this historic moment of discovery, with Cammeyer, perhaps in a frock coat and stove-pipe hat, surveying this expanse and envisioning his ballpark, above a picture-caption such as, “Wm. H. Cammeyer at the Cradle of the American Ballpark.” But in the event, the summer game, warm breezes, and green 5elds hardly 5gured in Cammeyer’s thoughts; he was instead envisioning ice, frost, snow, and a winter sport. 2e sport of ice skating was another unlikely element in the creation of the ballpark. Skating had become a craze in recent winters (Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper would describe skating in 1866 as “the “National Winter Exercise”) and had spawned a rivalry among several large skating ponds around New York. In Brooklyn, the 5rst had opened in 1860; named Washington Park, it spanned twelve acres, was ringed by a fence, and it may have been a precursor of Cammeyer’s ballpark.

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Cammeyer knew that to wrest a pro5table piece of the skating boom he would have to lure skaters with a 5rst-rate “resort,” as these elaborate rinks were sometimes known. By all accounts, he succeeded; his patriotically named Union Pond opened on Christmas Day, 1861, a little more than eight months after the bombardment of Fort Sumter, and it was splendid. Over the coming winters, Cammeyer enlarged his pond and added attractions, o=ering band-music, 5re- works, and light-shows on the ice from a three-story pagoda in the rink. 2ere were two large wooden structures on the rink’s edge to provide skaters warmth, refreshments, and other amenities. After the 5rst winter, Cammeyer drained the pond, and on May 15, 1862, he unveiled the “Union Base Ball and Cricket Grounds.” 2e opening game was free to spectators, but Cammeyer would afterward charge ten cents for admission; he raised the price to twenty-5ve cents in 1867. Like his skating pond, Cammeyer’s ballpark was a great success; unlike the pond, it was not initially planned. When Cammeyer was contemplating pro5table warm- weather uses for the vacant lot, baseball was only one possibility among several. He had considered simultaneous multiple uses, including a riding school, a gymnastic club, and a boating pond, as well as ball 5elds. He might have 5nally chosen to use the land for baseball (and for cricket, although the latter was apparently not much played) because of certain similarities the game had to ice skating. Although they 4ourished in opposing seasons, and resort-skating was primarily a participant sport while baseball, at least for Cammeyer’s purposes, was a spectator sport, both were immensely popular in New York

3?@ T!" G#$% W!& N"'"$ C()" B(*+ (,- O.!"$ E//(0/ and becoming still more so; both required a large open area; and both were proven cash generators. 2eir key di=erence, from an entrepreneurial perspective, was their revenue models. Resort-owners made money by charging skaters admission fees; owners of open 5elds around the city pro5ted by charging ball clubs rent for use of the land for games (spectators were welcome to come and go from the 5elds as they pleased). Cammeyer — once he decided to convert Union Pond into a ball 5eld in summers — had intended to follow common practice and rent the land to ball clubs. But something early on changed his mind, and prompted a radical idea: he would charge spectators a fee to watch the game. Cammeyer left no account of what inspired his ballpark or how he developed it, leaving historians of the game to rely on scanty contemporary evidence — a few newspapers articles and etchings, a few 5nancial documents. He might have gotten his idea from an earlier ball game: an “all-star” match held in the summer of 1858, in Corona, Queens. 2at game was played in a fenced-in horse-racing course and drew almost 10,000 spectators, who each paid 5fty cents to watch the best ball players of Manhattan and Brooklyn compete. But it’s as likely that the ice-skating resort — his own, or his rival Washington Park — provided a 5nancial model. A foundational aspect of the resort was an ancient invention: the simple fence. Cammeyer’s fence — a board fence six or seven feet high — compelled customers to pay for the privilege of ice skating, and it would serve for the ballpark, too. To re5t the grounds for summer, Cammeyer built a primitive grandstand holding about 1,500 spectators, and

3?A T,#$# U.#/ (! *# % B%118%$- a clubhouse. He retained the structures serving the ice rink, rather than have to rebuild them in winter; he let the pagoda remain, in what became center 5eld in the warm weather, and fans could watch the game from within it. 2ousands more were permitted to stand or sit along the out5eld fence. (2ose who declined to pay admission could watch the games from an embankment beyond the fence.) But Cammeyer not only built the 5rst ballpark; once he committed to the summer game he fully embraced it and brought the same showmanship that he had to his ice-skating resort. Cammeyer is credited with introducing the Star-Spangled Banner, luxury seats, a press box, and refreshments, among other things that have become inte- gral to the ballpark. He o=ered special seats “for ladies.” A band played. 2ere were 5reworks. With such novelties, Cammeyer created the “ballpark experience,” which brought the charm of festiveness and the comforts of seats and refreshments to what had been a game played on open 5elds. Cammeyer presided triumphantly over the Union Grounds well into the 1870s before the ballpark began a slow decline. A great promoter and showman, Cammeyer proved a poor manager of his ballpark’s home team, the Mutuals. 2e team bled money and was expelled from the National League for failing to make a trip out west at the end of the 1876 season. Afterward, Cammeyer seemed to have lost interest in the ballpark and leased it out to amateur teams. 2e Union Grounds’ 5nal, ignominious season was in 1882. 2e previous winter, the Brooklyn Eagle noted the shabby state of the 5eld and made the last known mention of the plank fence that had been crucial to creating America’s 5rst ballpark:

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Cammeyer’s Union Pond, circa 1862. Lithograph by Winslow Homer. Published by #omas & Eno.

2e fence now standing is rotting away fast, and there will not be much left of it by the Spring. It would cost as much to 5t up that 5eld again as to fence in a new ground.

But the 5eld was not 5tted up, nor a new fence built (nor a plank of the historic fence rescued for posterity). 2e Union Grounds was demolished in the summer of 1883 (today, the 47th Regiment armory stands on part of the site). Cammeyer died in 1898, at age seventy-seven, in his Brooklyn brownstone. He left a widow and seven children. But he was a forgotten man. His obituary in the New York Times, of one paragraph, eulogized him as “once well known in baseball circles as the founder of the Union Baseball Grounds.” 2is was an injustice. Cammeyer was more than the founder of a ballpark; he was the founder of 2e Ballpark, and by extension, a founder of America’s “national past time” as much as better-known pioneers of the game.

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Cammeyer’s Ballpark was a fortuitous joining of the game with commerce, of leisure with capitalism. But like all symbiotic relationships, it relied on a fragile balance of elements. 2at balance would endure, in its perfection, for a century before the Ballpark’s slide toward spectacle.

W,%( &. &;;#/&%(#1+ .($&-&'), when browsing old lithographs and photographs of early ballparks, is, not surprisingly, the how small the wooden grandstands appear and how vast the playing 5elds seem. But more to the point, what’s striking from our media-saturated age is how negligible the hoopla was, how little was needed for Americans of the Gilded Age to create the special, thrilling air of the ballpark. The early ballpark experience, as dreamed up by Cammeyer, was merely a magpie collection 5lched from all the circuses, political rallies, ice-skating resorts, race tracks, and parades of the American nineteenth century — the snapping 4ags, the colorful bunting, the wheezy oomp-pah-pah of brass bands, the primitive 5reworks when evening fell. Yet these scraps of canvas, these daubs of paint, these popular songs were su9cient, in combination, to create something truly new and marvelous under the sun: the enchanted, fenced-o= world of the American Ballpark, with all its summery, grassy, beery, cigar-and-straw-hatted festiveness. 2e atmosphere which enclosed those early grandstands might be described as a gentle charm. 2e only distractions from the game were the venders peddling refreshments, the billboards on out5eld fences advertising whiskey and tobacco, and occasional band-music. 2e

3@3 T!" G#$% W!& N"'"$ C()" B(*+ (,- O.!"$ E//(0/ ballpark still retained the air of familiar intimacy between players and spectators from when the game was played in open 5elds by clerks, artisans, and “gentlemen”; no doubt most spectators remembered those still-recent days. 2is period, the Ballpark’s Archaic Period, so to speak, endured for about 5fty years, crossing into the early decades of the twentieth century just before expiring. Several factors joined to end that era: the endemic 5res and collapses which plagued the wooden grandstands; the growing popularity of the game which drew larger, over- 4owing crowds; and the coming of the second industrial revolution which was verticalizing American cities with steel beams and reinforced concrete. 2e result was the birth of the Classical Period of the Ballpark, with the 5rst so-called jewel boxes. 2e jewel boxes — the reverent term probably originated in the early 1980s, two decades after most had been bulldozed — resist neat generalization, precisely because of their fabled quirkiness; each bore the imprimatur of its individual owner and of its home city. But it would generally be true to say that their grandstands were signi5cantly larger than those of their wooden forebears and that these ballparks were also intended to be more architecturally imposing — worthy of the rising national game and of their rising cities, and re4ecting the greatness, real or aspirational, of their home teams. Many “yards,” as the ballparks were sometimes called, were relatively rustic, but many, too, aimed for a sort of kitschy classical grandeur, with vaulted arches, rotundas, cupolas, mansard roofs. Yet even the most elaborate yards generally left visible much of their structural underpinnings — their steel beams and pillars

3@6 T,#$# U.#/ (! *# % B%118%$- and concrete blocks. 2e result was a mixture of luxury and ramshackle, of American modernity and Old World stateliness. Yet somehow, both in spite of and because of their architectural shortcomings, these ballparks more than met their occasion; they were triumphant achievements. 2eir blend of pomp and rough edges, which might have been absurd, instead melded beautifully; their steel posts and concrete blocks re4ected the masculine contest on the 5eld; their Roman architectural details re4ected the contest’s status as the national pastime of the world’s great modern republic. 2ese ballparks were large enough to achieve a bit of magni5cence, yet small enough to retain some portion of the old wooden grandstands’ intimacy with the players and the game on the 5eld. And the jewel boxes had the dignity that was bestowed by their distinct personalities, which in turn inspired the warm a=ection of generations of fans. 2ere are too many fans and players who have fondly recalled the jewel boxes to dismiss their tributes as rosy nostalgia. And the newsreels wonderfully preserve the jewel boxes’ magic: the grandstands envelope the dark 5erce seas of hatted crowds within a cavernous spaciousness, yet there is a closeness to the scene, like an optical illusion. True, the jewel boxes had 4aws in seating, with posts blocking some of the views, and the seats themselves were as hard as church pews, but these yards were beloved. Phillies center5elder and sportscaster Ritchie Ashburn famously eulogized Shibe Park, the 5rst steel-and-concrete ballpark, built in 1909 (and which had its share of pillar-blocked views): “It looked like a ballpark. It smelled like a ballpark. It had a feeling and a heartbeat, a personality that was all baseball.” 2e quote somehow wonderfully evokes the

3@: T!" G#$% W!& N"'"$ C()" B(*+ (,- O.!"$ E//(0/ players in their 4annel uniforms, the dirt, the grass, the bunting, the cheering crowds. Although the jewel boxes were larger and more elaborate than their wooden predecessors, they preserved Cammeyer’s ballpark experience essentially intact until the 1960s. 2e horseshoe-shaped grandstands formed protective walls around their green 5elds while the country endured two world wars and the Great Depression. It’s an historical irony that the ballpark experience survived such upheavals only to su=er grievously from America’s emergence into peace, prosperity, and optimism. 2e postwar era brought visions among urban plan- ners and politicians of Edenic suburbias replete with space-age ballparks. At about the same time, during the 5fties and the sixties, several old teams, such as the New York Giants and the Brooklyn Dodgers, relocated, and several expansion teams — the Los Angeles Angels, the Houston Astros, the New York Mets — emerged. All sought new homes. Jewel boxes across the country were 4attened and were replaced by concrete, multi-purpose sporting arenas, placed outside city centers. 2ese stadia were in many ways the precise opposite of the jewel boxes: minimalist, vast, nearly identical concrete rings set amid acres of outlying parking lots, to better serve a growing, aFuent, car-reliant middle class. And with the loss of the jewel boxes went much of the ballpark’s lingering nineteenth-century festive 4avor of bunting and snapping 4ags and homey intimacy and kitschy grandeur. And yet, looking back to when I was a boy, a tiny speck sitting in the immensity of Shea Stadium, in that

3@< T,#$# U.#/ (! *# % B%118%$- wilderness of parking lots in Queens, I realize that while the nineteenth-century charm had gone, there had survived one vital continuity with the jewel boxes: the old balance between the game on the 5eld and the commerce-driven distractions of the grandstand. 2at balance had endured, though perhaps somewhat weakened, despite the vast sleek surroundings and even the towering electronic scoreboard. 2e game itself remained the center of attention; distractions were still relatively few. You still felt, as one cannot today, that you were away from the tumult of the City, in some protected green place. 2e destruction of this last surviving element of the old ballpark experience occurred only a few years after I had abandoned baseball, with the invasion of pre-recorded rock music and video screens. Piped-in rock music 5rst shook ballparks in 1975, in the Orioles’ Memorial Stadium, an innovation by the team’s general manager, Frank Cashen, a former sportswriter and advertising executive, who wanted to dispense with old- fashioned organ music in order to strengthen the ballpark’s appeal to young people. 2e 5rst video screen was installed in the summer of 1980, in left 5eld of Dodgers Stadium. 2e screen displayed replays, messages, and statistics in color, although by contemporary standards it was primitive and tiny, at thirty-5ve feet high and twenty-5ve feet wide. But the screens swiftly multiplied and grew, and by the mid-eighties, color video screens occupied fourteen major league ballparks; by the early nineties, they were in more than two dozen. 2e noise and bedlam reached a crescendo at the 1987 World Series, which pitted the Minnesota Twins against

3@> T!" G#$% W!& N"'"$ C()" B(*+ (,- O.!"$ E//(0/ the St. Louis Cardinals, at the Twins’ indoor stadium, the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome. 2e stadium, which had opened in 1982, was true to its nickname, the “Decibeldome.” 2e noise during the 5fth game of the series reached 115 decibels, which the New York Times’ sportswriter Jack Anderson compared with “standing 100 feet behind a jetliner when it’s about to take o=.” 2e players said afterward that they couldn’t hear themselves speak to one another on the 5eld. Anderson remarked: “More and more, accompanied by the thumping music that the young generation prefers, crowd noise has increased in baseball, if not intruded upon it and in4uenced it.” He darkly, yet presciently, observed, “the Decibeldome is merely a sneak preview of 21st century baseball.” 2e Times writer’s recoil at this vision of a baseball dys- topia was widely shared. 2e Decibeldome and others of its kind, and the concrete multi-use stadia, had brought renewed appreciation of the virtues of the nearly extinct jewel boxes. 2en, in 1992, miraculously, a new jewel box rose, in Baltimore. Oriole Park at Camden Yards, the new home of the Orioles, was adorned with red-brick walls, exposed steel beams, quirky contours, real grass in the out5eld, and a view of the city beyond the out5eld fence, encompassing the antique Baltimore and Ohio Railroad warehouse across the street. Camden Yards was designed as a baseball-only facility and was smaller than the multi-purpose stadia, to recapture some of the intimacy of the jewel boxes. Even the ballpark’s name, with its carefully chosen word “yards” — the word referenced the nearby former railroad yards — conjured the Old Ball Game. Camden Yards was widely praised for recapturing the

3@? T,#$# U.#/ (! *# % B%118%$- jewel box-era’s charm; there were inevitably critics, who dismissed the design as a hokey throwback, but they were in the minority. Camden Yards, like Cammeyer’s Union Grounds, bred many descendants. 2e modernist stadia which had once displaced the jewel boxes were now themselves demolished to make way for new ballparks. 2rough the following decades, as Camden Yards- inspired ballparks, such as Citi Field, multiplied, they evolved in myriad directions, to the point that they can be viewed as forming a sort of wild phylogenetic tree. 2e branches of this evolution increasingly veered away from the jewel box and toward the amusement park, the mall, the fantasy spaceship. 2e result, today, is a bizarre bestiary. On one hand, we have Camden Yards itself, representing the extreme of the architectural counter-revolution, the pure homage to the jewel box; on the other hand, we have, to take an example almost at random, Marlins Park, built two decades after Camden Yards, in Miami — a sleek, curving, concrete-metal- and-glass “abstraction of water merging with land,” as its architectural 5rm, Populous, describes it. More recently, yet another evolutionary branch has grown, in the form of the Atlanta Braves’ SunTrust Park. Built in 2017, it’s a “mixed use” facility, or “mall-park,” in which the ballpark is surrounded by a complex of o9ces and apartments, shopping and restaurant areas, and “entertainment venues.” Here, the game and ballpark are reduced to merely a part of a larger, multi-faceted business enterprise. 2e mixed-use model is expected to become the dominant trend because it provides areas outside the ballpark to stimulate revenue for the property throughout the year.

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Even among such diversity, certain architectural elements are common. Mostly, these have been backward-looking attempts to restore some of the jewel boxes’ prized qualities, such as their intimacy (by shrinking the grandstands and bringing seats nearer the 5eld) and their close identi5cation with their host cities (by relocating ballparks downtown from suburbs). Some ballparks o=er at least a nod to the receding traditions and heroes of the Old Ball Game through vest- pocket museums, and statues of great ballplayers. But overall, there is dwindling architectural common ground. 2is variety may re4ect a lack of consensus, even a pervasive uncertainty, among both owners and fans, about what the ballpark is, or should be, in a world that would have been considered implausible science 5ction to the crowds at Cammeyer’s Union Grounds in the 1860s, or for that matter, to those at Shea Stadium in the 1970s, when transistor radios and newspapers were the only ways to learn of news of the world beyond the ballpark walls. 2is uncertainty, which has produced such vastly di=erent ballparks as Marlins Park and Camden Yards, appears to be, at root, about how to balance the competing architectural demands of honoring the game’s past while bringing the game into the future — and while paying building expenses that can exceed $1 billion. However, this architectural 4ailing may soon pass. 2e Ballpark’s future, to look even beyond the Braves’ mixed-use model, may be so di=erent as to be unrecognizable even to us. In a recent issue of National Geographic magazine, Populous, the architectural 5rm that has designed not only Camden Yards and Marlins Park but more than twenty American ballparks of all varieties, ventured its vision of “The

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Ballpark of Tomorrow.” Populous described it as a “multi- use, multi-experiential ecosystem.” An illustration shows a structure with solar panels, a park, o9ces, and residences. It resembles, in its all-inclusiveness, an imagined colony on the moon. Should this model become reality, it would bring the ballpark so far from its rustic origins that there would be no real point to jewel box nostalgia. But if team owners lack consensus on the ideal architectural shell of the ballpark, they clearly agree on the ideal form within it: a lavish array of entertaining distractions and luxurious amenities promising to gorge the crowd’s senses for the duration of the game — and, of course, to bring pro5ts to the owners of ballparks and a9liated businesses. 2is pursuit of pro5ts had long been a life-giving force for the professional game. Cammeyer’s Union Grounds and its descendants had developed a bene5cial symbiotic relationship with many businesses, which often thrived within their hosts — scoreboard manufacturers, scorecard printers, refreshment vendors, and billboard makers. But capitalism will almost always seek ways to expand, heedless to other considerations, and by the 1980s, with the invasion of the new music and sound systems and videos screens, the symbiosis became harmful; the marketing began to impair the host, the 5ne balance was lost. In the decades since, capitalism has continued to over- burden the ballpark, progressively destroying it, in what long ago became a parasitic relationship. Refreshments, once simple fare, are o=ered for exorbitant prices in gourmet restaurants or glassed-in lounges or cafes, where the game is only viewable on yet more screens. Tropicana Field, home of the Tampa Bay Rays, o=ers among its distractions a 10,000

3@B T!" G#$% W!& N"'"$ C()" B(*+ (,- O.!"$ E//(0/ gallon aquarium of sting rays behind the right 5eld wall, an arcade of shops, an interactive playground, catwalks above the 5eld, party areas with picnic-style arrangements, a massive three-paneled video scoreboard, a “baseball carnival” for children to play games, batting cages, and so forth. If all this weren’t enough, after a homerun, a sculpture of marlins activates, spraying water just beyond the out5eld. Tropicana Field is not atypical: the Arizona Diamondbacks’ Chase Field has a swimming pool behind the out5eld fence; the Kansas City Royals’ Kau=man Stadium has fountains that are displayed between innings, and a continuously 4owing waterfall behind the right 5eld fence; the Los Angeles Angels boast a grandstand with a collection of arti5cial rocks and streams. All of this carries costs, and these embellishments, combined with the trend to reduce seats to increase comfort and intimacy, have sent admission prices soaring, and prompted charges — which can be traced back to the multi-purpose stadia of the sixties — that the ballpark is becoming a theme-park for the elite. Most notably, the media assault within the ballpark intensi5es. As the owners themselves acknowledge, technology has converted homes into entertainment centers, and the ballpark must lure spectators by o=ering what cannot be enjoyed in the living room. 2e ballparks’ music systems and video screens are continually enhanced. Today, the average video board has swollen to about 8,000 square feet, or four times the size from a decade earlier. 2e largest yet is in Progressive Field, home of the Cleveland Indians, which has a video screen that is 221-feet wide and 5fty-nine feet tall, or 13,000 square feet — 3,000 square feet larger than Elvis Presley’s original Graceland mansion; if that is still

3AD T,#$# U.#/ (! *# % B%118%$- not enough, there are seven ribbon video-displays winding around the grandstand. Moreover, such distractions have 5nally entered the last remaining jewel box to hold out against a video board, Chicago’s Wrigley Field. Camden Yards, not to be left behind, now has a video board and scoreboard in center 5eld, an out-of-town scoreboard in right 5eld, and “ribbon” boards along the club level and upper deck. In truth, Camden Yards is not an old-fashioned ballpark, except in its architecture, nor does it claim to be; in its entertaining distractions, it is quite contemporary. 2e ballpark’s motto is “An old fashioned ballpark with modern amenities.” And true to its words, Camden Yards o=ers a party deck, picnic area, bars, lounges, gourmet restaurants, and an entertainment and concessions area for children. While Camden Yards was a reactionary rebu= of the architecture of modernist stadia, it was not a rejection of the subsequent media-technology revolution. Camden Yards merely sought to replace the vast, charmless modernist shells that surrounded that revolution. To be sure, the owners insist that they have sought to balance old and new: “In order to preserve the traditional feel of Oriole Park while providing fans with the most modern technology, the Orioles hired an expert design team to work with the Maryland Stadium Authority to deliver major technological upgrades while preserving the ballpark’s historic aesthetic.” But the result is merely a quaint home for the media panoply, like an Edwardian parlor lined with giant televisions and with piped-in rock music. Quaint architecture is not su9cient to revive the old ballpark experience amid the overwhelming distractions.

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A11 $#"!1E(&!'. — political, industrial, cultural — are relatively sudden eruptions after long rumblings, and this is true for the media revolution in the ballpark. Precursors to video screens and recorded rock music date back decades. 2e 5rst scoreboards — including even a few primitive electric scoreboards — appeared before World War I. As long ago as 1959, the Yankees mounted a lit message board, and in 1976, Fenway Park also acquired one, along with an instant-replay board. In the mid-sixties, both Shea Stadium and the Astrodome unveiled enormous electronic scoreboards armed with lights and various sound e=ects. And there was the famed “exploding scoreboard” in Comiskey Park, which was constructed in 1960 and featured 5reworks, sounds, and strobe lights to celebrate homeruns. However, these early contraptions were each unique, were jerry-rigged by a few team owners and had limited command of fans’ attention. By contrast, the video screen of the eighties was in essence a mass-produced commodity of spellbinding power, and it quickly became nearly universal. Similarly, music had accompanied ball games since the 5rst ballparks, in the form of brass bands, and since the 1940s by organs. 2e revolutionary aspect of pre-recorded rock music, as with the video screens, lay in the extent of its intrusiveness. 2e owners’ eager appropriation of the new technology seems, at least at 5rst glance, inexplicable. In studying the French Revolution we ask why at that particular moment in 1789, masses of the poor armed with pitchforks and muskets decided to 5nally overthrow a reactionary ruling class; so, in a far smaller way we might ask why the ballpark owners, after decades of reactionary rule of the game,

3A6 T,#$# U.#/ (! *# % B%118%$- suddenly decided, armed with pixels and music, to storm their own ballparks and destroy their own Old Regime — the Old Ballpark — the prosperous green kingdoms which their predecessors had so strenuously fought to preserve. 2e owners faced no signi5cant 5nancial or popular pressure for change. Certainly, in the 1980s they grappled with economic challenges, including skyrocketing players’ salaries, rising administrative costs, and competition from other sports, like football. However, both attendance and revenue overall were rising throughout the decade. Nor were fans in the early 1980s clamoring for video screens and rock music — these barely existed in ballparks. But the Japanese company Mitsubishi had developed the 5rst video board and sought to sell it; the company o=ered it to the Dodgers for one dollar, a virtual gift, a capitalist Trojan horse that succeeded beyond Mitsubishi’s wildest dreams in capturing the enormous, virgin market of the American ballparks. After the 5rst video screens appeared, the owners had apparently simply counted gate receipts, held up a collective wet 5nger to the zeitgeist, and decided that Spectacle was the future. 2e decision is breathtaking in its casualness, its audacity: a deliberate obliteration of what remained of the ballpark experience since the days of Cammeyer — a 5nal and willful transformation of the nineteenth century ballpark into a twenty-5rst century arena for spectacle. 2e old-time “magnates,” as the team owners were once known with a touch of mock deference, seldom reached unanimity on any issue, but during the jewel-box era they generally had eyed with deep suspicion any change to their ballparks. 2ey were what would today be described as typical incumbents of a mature and pro5table business, and

3A: T!" G#$% W!& N"'"$ C()" B(*+ (,- O.!"$ E//(0/ they held the typical incumbents’ tight grip on the status quo. (“Ballpark owners are the most stubborn to change,” observed Branch Rickey, among the game’s great innova- tors, in the 1940s.) In labor relations and integration, the magnates were, in fact, staunch reactionaries: they clung for decades to the “reserve clause,” the notorious contract provision which chained players to their teams for years, and most resisted opening the leagues to Blacks. In other aspects, they were merely arch-conservatives. 2ey supported change only when su9ciently assured that it was inevitable (expansion teams), was pro5t-enhancing (klieg lights for night games, and broadcasts on radio and television), or was at least 5nancially harmless (putting numbers on players’ uniforms). Ironically, the magnates had opposed even allowing the 5rst scoreboards, believing they would lose money from scorecard sales. 2e early magnates — men like Andrew Freedman, owner of the New York Giants, and Charles Comiskey, owner of the Chicago White Sox — were often ruthless businessmen of America’s bare-knuckled, nineteenth- century capitalist mold, and their tactics were often as dirty as their early, gambling-infected ball game of sharpened spikes and doctored balls. 2ere were decent men among the magnates, such as Barney Dreyfuss, owner of the Pittsburgh Pirates, or the natty Connie Mack of the As. And many truly loved the game and had been players in their youth. But often enough they behaved like the stereotype of the Gilded Age tycoon — the big-bellied, top-hatted, middle- aged operator who smoked cigars in conspiratorial meetings in backrooms. When they weren’t 5ghting with each other, they were scheming against political opponents or crushing

3A< T,#$# U.#/ (! *# % B%118%$- the players — mostly ignorant boys — to near servitude, with pauper’s salaries and brutal management tactics. And yet, these most unpoetical of tough old birds built urban retreats of lyrical beauty, pastoral arenas for displays of the grace, speed, and power of youth. (It’s worth noting, in the context of today’s towering, blaring video boards, that despite the magnates’ lust for pro5t, several of them — Barney Dreyfuss, Connie Mack, and Garry Herrmann of the Reds — refused to allow any billboards in their yards, to preserve their beauty and integrity.) 2e magnates’ shared vision of their ballparks, as far as they had one, was simply of preserving them as they had “always” been. 2ey knew that their game was beloved by fans precisely for its adherence to tradition, its accumu- lation of legend and lore. In truth, the game underwent many changes during the jewel-box era, such as the shift from the dead-ball to the live-ball era, integration, night games, and so forth. But the ballpark experience in the grandstands, the delicate balance between the game and ballpark distractions, had endured. 2e Old Regime began to signi5cantly erode in the early 1960s, when the multi-sport stadia began replacing the jewel boxes, along with myriad other changes: the designated hitter, 4ashy new uniforms, arti5cial turf, free agency for players. By the eighties, roughly half the owners were new to the game and many were not individuals but corporations. Links to the jewel box-era were weakened, easing the way for the ballpark’s media revolution. Revolutions often are said to be borne along by an “irresistible momentum,” and this seems true of the ballpark’s transformation in the eighties. Owners scrambled

3A> T!" G#$% W!& N"'"$ C()" B(*+ (,- O.!"$ E//(0/ to keep up with rivals. In 1985, after the San Diego Padres unveiled their video board in the out5eld, Dick Freeman, the team’s vice president, was quoted in the Los Angeles Times as saying, “It was probably the fact that they were becoming so common around the league that we felt this was something this stadium needed.” (Although Freeman added, “Anyone who’s ever seen one before knows how much it enhances a fan’s enjoyment of the game.”) It might be argued that owners didn’t grasp the extent of the metamorphosis they were bringing to the ballpark, but the radical nature of the new technology was obvious to everyone. In the press, the incursion was immediately recognized as an historical turning point in the ballpark experience. Shortly before the debut of the 5rst video screen, in 1980, the Los Angeles Times, in an article that appears to parrot a Dodgers’ press release, referred to the screen frankly as “revolutionary” (“A revolutionary $3-million full-color video display system.”) Six years later, after the screens had 4ourished, the New York Times referred to that 5rst screen as “the single most signi5cant change in ballpark entertainment.” And the following year came Jack Anderson’s insight that “the Decibeldome was merely a sneak preview of 21st century baseball.” At about the same time, in August 1987, a writer for the Los Angeles Times, Bob Sector, re4ected that Wrigley Field’s scoreboard — one of the last remaining hand- operated boards in the major leagues — was “a piece of Americana gone the way of the steam train, bowling pin boys and the central switchboard operator at the phone company.” He remarked: “At Wrigley, unlike most major

3A? T,#$# U.#/ (! *# % B%118%$- league parks, there’s no razzle-dazzle in the scoreboard — no videos, no instant replays, no exploding 5reworks to distract the youngsters.” 2e video screen was clearly a sorcerer’s wand. Paul Halil, who operated that pioneering tiny video board in Dodgers Stadium in 1980, recalled: “We quickly learned that it could be a dominating media. I mean, it could overwhelm a game.”

A1;!.( 0$!; (,# *&$(, of the ballpark, the capitalist possibilities of spectacle had lit up the imaginations of a minority of maverick team owners. 2ey saw their grandstands 5lled with thousands of people seeking entertainment, and they envisioned larger crowds if they provided a 4ashier show. Cammeyer himself, an impresario at heart, had infused the progenitor of all ballparks with a hint of spectacle, and it would remain a troublesome inheritance. Most of the old magnates, while publicly willing to admit that baseball was a business, even a tough business, strenuously denied that it was just “show business,” a term which both undercut the fragile integrity of their sporting contests and carried connotations of low entertainment. Professional baseball, too, had low and shady associations — the game had long been linked with gambling, dirty play, organized crime, raucous fans, players’ salacious scandals — alongside its exalted status as the national pastime. Magnates such as Albert Spalding — a player, owner of the White Stockings, and founder of the sporting goods empire that still bears his name — labored for years to elevate the game’s public image through the press and books. 2e magnates

3A@ T!" G#$% W!& N"'"$ C()" B(*+ (,- O.!"$ E//(0/ resented the few mavericks who de5antly embraced and promoted the show-business aspect of the ballpark. 2e 5rst of the great mavericks, and perhaps the most farsighted, was a German immigrant named Chris Von der Ahe, and he was in every way an a=ront to the magnates: he was a saloon keeper, he was brash, he was pro4igate, and he was a showman to rival P.T. Barnum. He was famed for his bushy black mustache, colorful clothes, and thick German accent, and he relished his role as the major leagues’ “millionaire sportsman,” as he described himself. Von der Ahe strode into baseball in the early 1880s, when he bought the St. Louis Browns. After the Browns sank in the standings, Von der Ahe built a new, larger ballpark, named, like his 5rst, “Sportsman’s Park,” and he added attractions. 2ere was a beer garden, separated only by ropes from the playing 5eld; there was a horse-racing track which circled the ballpark and could be heard by fans and players; there was a bicycling track, an arti5cial lake, and a “Shoot-the-Chute” giant water slide. According to one story, Von der Ahe had “a dozen maidens in 4owing robes” who “sounded a fanfare on silver trumpets” — a sort of proto walk-up music — for his star hitter, Tip O’Neill. Sportsman’s Park became known as the “Coney Island of the West.” As #e Saturday Evening Post recalled in 1946, Von der Ahe “created a circus atmosphere generally.” He also allowed the grandstands to become a haven for gamblers and petty thieves. Eventually, Von der Ahe was beset by marital scandals and by legal and 5nancial woes, and he left the game in disgrace. But before he vanished, Von der Ahe became the 5rst magnate to signi5cantly re-imagine Cammeyer’s ball-

3AA T,#$# U.#/ (! *# % B%118%$- park experience, and did so during Cammeryer’s lifetime. He reshaped the Ballpark into an arena primarily serving up spectacle, similar to the theme park-stadium of today. Among Von der Ahe’s notable descendants in the mid-twentieth century was Charles O. Finley, owner of the Kansas City (later Oakland) Athletics. Finley put his team in glitzy uniforms of green and gold; he had a picnic area with a small petting zoo behind the left 5eld fence, and a 4ock of sheep on a ridge behind the right 5eld fence; he brought in a mule mascot with a “uniform” and cap with the team’s colors; he had a mechanical rabbit which popped up from the grass to supply the umpire with new balls; he had an electronic message panel for “fan o grams”; he had cow-milking and pig-chasing contests before games, and so on. Finley’s rough contemporary Roy Hofheinz, owner of the Houston Astros, was a rotund, cigar-smoking autocrat who drove a Cadillac. Tellingly, he built an amusement park named Astroworld and bought a majority ownership of Ringling Brothers-Barnum & Bailey Circus. He also presided over the most extravagant stadium in the major leagues in the sixties. 2e Astrodome was the 5rst modern multi-purpose stadium and the 5rst domed stadium; it also had two massive, animated scoreboards. Among the most colorful mavericks was Bill Veeck, owner, successively, of the Cleveland Indians, St. Louis Browns, and Chicago White Sox. Veeck’s father, a sportswriter, became owner of the Chicago Cubs, and Veeck grew up in the game. Like Hofheinz, he had a tie to the circus: his 5rst wife had been a horseback rider with Ringling Brothers. And between games of a doubleheader, Veeck

3AB T!" G#$% W!& N"'"$ C()" B(*+ (,- O.!"$ E//(0/ once imported a circus to the playing 5eld. He also gave away animals at games; he held “Grandstand Manager’s Day,” at which fans could hold up placards to determine team strategy; he signed a three-foot seven-inch man to bat for the Browns — his small stature would make it almost impossible for pitchers to throw within his strike zone. And in 1960, Veeck built the “exploding scoreboard” in Comiskey Park. 2e mavericks proved farsighted. Baseball has ful5lled their early vision of Spectacle.

N!( #"#$+!'# C%. %;E.#/. 2e sporting press widely shared the magnates’ feudal vision of the ballpark, and regularly attacked the mavericks’ antics as degrading to the game. Von der Ahe was excoriated for allowing gamblers and “rogues” to overrun Sportsman’s Park after the racetrack was built: in 1895, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch ran an editorial titled “2e Prostitution of a Ballpark.” In 1930, the Sporting News, which was founded in the 1880s and dubbed “the Bible of Baseball,” published an editorial, titled “Be Discreet,” which admonished owners who had followed the seductive vision of spectacle to return to the old balance between ballpark distractions and the game on the 5eld. 2e editorial averred that the virtues of the game were su9cient to 5ll the grandstands; there was no need to resort to “side show accessories,” which brought “a counterfeit of genuine interest” and corrupted the game into a “circus.” If the owners remembered this truth, they would “retain that 5ne sense of balance which major league baseball should have and that sense of dignity which major

3BD T,#$# U.#/ (! *# % B%118%$- league baseball deserves.” 2e writer concluded: “2ere is no need for baseball to seek publicity as a circus would seek it. Yet there are some in baseball who appear to think that it should have its clowns and jesters…” Seven years later, the periodical felt compelled to again remind certain owners — ostensibly in the minor leagues but clearly also the mavericks in the majors — that the “best promotional methods” were limited to “those which enhance the comfort of the fans and contribute to their enjoyment of the game.” 2e editorial, titled “Keeping Ballyhoo in Its Place,” stressed that even when teams were struggling in the standings “there is no reason for resorting to fan-dancers, hog-calling contests, donkey ball or other devices that in no stretch of the imagination are related to baseball.” In other words, there was no reason to resort to spectacle. 2e idea of 5nding the proper balance for the game and ballpark distractions was at the heart of the matter, and it would reverberate through the decades — as would the comparison of the ball game with the circus. 2e circus — particularly the three-ring circus — was the most recognizable spectacle in America and was inevitably used (as it still is, despite its demise) as a symbol for all low spectacle. With its confusion of simultaneous acts, animal stunts in sawdust, and carneys touting false wonders behind torn curtains, the circus was dangled as a sort cautionary tale of what might become of baseball if the owners tipped the ballpark’s old “5ne sense of balance.” 2e warnings could convey a preacher’s urgency, perhaps because there was uneasiness about the ballpark’s a9nities with the circus — the shared summer season, the large crowds, the displays of physical prowess. 2e

3B3 T!" G#$% W!& N"'"$ C()" B(*+ (,- O.!"$ E//(0/ game’s slang included “circus catch,” “circus seats” (the bleachers), and “traveling circus” (teams on the road). 2e circus even compared itself to baseball: in September 1919, John Ringling wrote in #e American Magazine that “People come to a circus in a mood di=erent from that in which they approach any other amusement, possibly excepting baseball.” At the root of these warnings was the legitimate fear that a slide into spectacle would destroy the very essence of the game. A spectacle like the circus is a very di=erent type of entertainment than a baseball game. It deliberately tears viewers’ attention in all directions without pause for its dazzling e=ect. Each act — the tightrope walker, lion tamer, clown, acrobatic troupe — is brief, and exists only for drawing gasps. 2e viewer can turn from one act to another and back again without any real loss of enjoyment. A baseball game, by contrast, demands sustained concentration on a single contest, which unfolds as a dramatic narrative. 2e two could not be more dissimilar. Among the more insightful warnings about the perils of unfettered ballpark distractions — whether they were relevant to the game or not — was by the sports writer Roger Angell, in the 1960s, amid the era’s sweeping modernist changes to the traditional ballpark. In a 1966 article in #e New Yorker, Angell re5ned the arguments of earlier sports writers, identifying the danger of distractions as lying in their impingement on the fan’s ability to concentrate on the game’s pace. Describing the embellishments of the new Astrodome, Angell wrote:

What matters, what appalls, in Houston is the attempt being made there to alter the quality of baseball’s

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time. Baseball’s clock ticks inwardly and silently, and a man absorbed in a ball game is caught in a slow, green place of removal and concentration and in a tension that is screwed up slowly and ever more tightly with each pitcher’s windup and with the almost imperceptible forward lean and little half-step with which the 5elders accompany each pitch. Whatever the pace of the particular baseball game we are watching, whatever its outcome, it holds us in its own continuum and mercifully releases us from our own. Any persistent e=ort to destroy this unique phenomenon, to “use up” baseball’s time with planned distractions, will in fact transform the sport into another mere entertainment and thus hasten its descent to the status of a boring and stylized curiosity. It seems to me that the Houston impresarios are trying to build a following by the distraction and entire control of their audience’s attention — aiming at a sort of wraparound, programmed environment, of the kind currently under excited discussion by new thinkers of the electronic age.

Angell was focused on the threat of distractions within the ballpark in the mid-sixties, but another writer, two decades earlier, had looked further ahead. A wonderfully imaginative protest of the pernicious in4uence of media technology on professional sport came from Angell’s colleague at #e New Yorker, E.B. White (who happened to be Angell’s stepfather). White’s article concerned football, but was aimed at all professional sports. In late October 1947, White’s satiric, weirdly prophetic essay, titled, “2e Decline of Sport,” foresaw, almost to the decade, the transformation of professional sports into spectacle. 2e essay was published after the World Series between the New York Yankees and Brooklyn Dodgers, which caused hysteria in New York and was the 5rst series to be televised; the sports frenzy may have prompted the essay. 2e piece

3B: T!" G#$% W!& N"'"$ C()" B(*+ (,- O.!"$ E//(0/ also appeared after headlines announced that Chuck Yeager had become the 5rst pilot to break the sound barrier in a supersonic 4ight. Subtitled “A Preposterous Parable,” the piece imagined American sports in “the third decade of the supersonic age” (the 1970s), when sports reached a peak of record- breaking feats and attendance. Hundreds of thousands of fans crammed vast stadiums for sports events but barely watched them, distracted by other games being broadcast by transistor radios and television, while skywriting planes above provided updated out-of-town game scores, and football matches had “giant video sets, just behind the goal posts.” 2e national sports madness escalates until 1975, when an “overwrought” football fan, who “was so saturated with sport and with the disappointments of sport that he had clearly become deranged” murders a player at a game. 2e crime sets o= an absurd chain of tragedies involving colliding skywriting planes overhead and motorists below. 2e essay is similar in certain dystopian aspects to the Times’ reporting about the 1987 World Series at the Decibeldome. We are troubled by the uncanny familiarity of the bleak, mass sports frenzies that White is attacking, in a parable which, sadly, no longer seems quite so preposterous. “2e e=ect of this vast cyclorama of sport,” White wrote, “was to divide the spectator’s attention, oversubtilize his appreciation and deaden his passion.” 2e essay ends with horri5ed fans abandoning sports spectacles:

From that day on, sport waned. 2rough long, noncompetitive Saturday afternoons, the stadia slumbered. Even the parkways fell into disuse as

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motorists rediscovered the charms of old, twisty roads that led through main streets and past barnyards, with their mild congestions and pleasant smells.

Americans have not reached this universal revulsion to sports, of course, but otherwise the piece proved a chillingly accurate forecast of the trend toward media spectacle at sporting events. In 1977, thirty years after White’s essay predicting the decline of sport in the mid-seventies, the cultural critic Christopher Lasch declared that the decline had arrived. Although Lasch did not mention White’s essay, his own essay’s title, “2e Degradation of Sport,” echoed, inten- tionally or not, White’s “2e Decline of Sport.” Lasch’s essay appeared three years before the ballpark media revolution truly arrived, with the 5rst video screen in Giants stadium, but he had already seen enough. Lasch joined the line of Jeremiahs decrying professional sport’s slide into spectacle. He relied on history and social science to propose that the degradation of sport could be traced to its separation from a sacred religious rite, after which games “deteriorate into triviality and crude sensationalism”:

What corrupts athletic performance, as it does every other performance, is not professionalism or competition but a breakdown of the conventions surrounding the game. It is at this point that ritual, drama, and sports all degenerate into spectacle.

Lasch also maintained that the degradation of professional sport was inescapable in contemporary America: “In a society dominated by the production and

3B> T!" G#$% W!& N"'"$ C()" B(*+ (,- O.!"$ E//(0/ consumption of images, no part of life can long remain immune from the invasion of spectacle.” Television, that ubiquitous producer of endless images, was clearly among the targets in Lasch’s crosshairs. TV had also been a target, earlier that decade, for the great radio sportscaster Red Barber. Barber did not speak directly of television’s role in the degradation of sport, but he did express concern, as Roger Angell had a few years before, about the destruction of baseball’s pace. In July 1971, he told True magazine:

I think it’s a mistake to televise baseball the way they’re doing it today. All the instant replays and stop- action shots and slow-motion effects drive you to distraction. 2e continuity of the contest is destroyed. When I watch a baseball game on TV these days I get restless and irritated and pretty soon I turn it o=. I don’t have to take that kind of punishment.

T,# ;%"#$&7-., meanwhile, had been o=ering public justi5cations for their entertainments. In his 1962 autobiography, Bill Veeck denied that his innovations had eroded the balance within the ballpark, that he was transforming the game into spectacle:

My philosophy as a baseball operator could not be more simple. It is to create the greatest enjoyment for the greatest number of people. Not by detracting from the ball game but by adding a few moments of fairly simple pleasure. My intention was always to draw people to the park and make baseball fans out of them.

And:

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When I 5rst began to present 5reworks displays, the Old Guard screamed that I was cheapening baseball by trying to lure the fans in with other attractions. …[but the] baseball game was still the main attraction.

Veeck’s explanation appears, super5cially, to carry a valid point: that adding attractions to the ballpark merely increases everyone’s enjoyment. But although Veeck said that his “philosophy” could not be “more simple,” his assertions raise complex issues about the game’s relation to the commerce of the ballpark, and about the nature of incremental change: Is it really possible to “add a few moments of fairly simple pleasure” without detracting in some gradual way from the game? If so, how many “moments” become too many and reach a tipping point? (2e question returns us to Jack Anderson’s remark about the Decibeldome: “crowd noise has increased in baseball, if not intruded upon it and in4uenced it.”) Can one always give “the greatest enjoyment for the greatest number” while keeping the game as the “main attraction” — especially if a team is in the cellar of its league? And can baseball be run on such a utilitarianism basis without degradation? 2ese issues, in turn, invite us into the rich scienti5c and philosophic inquiry tracing back to the Enlightenment about the nature and limits of human “attention” itself. But Veeck’s protestations that he sought to preserve the game’s central position within the ballpark should be taken with a grain of salt. In 1964, he drew up for Popular Science magazine a picture of his “perfect ballpark.” 2e stadium had two “giant” scoreboards-and-TV screens, a glass-enclosed restaurant, a retractable, transparent dome,

3B@ T!" G#$% W!& N"'"$ C()" B(*+ (,- O.!"$ E//(0/ removable sod, platforms for 5reworks, automatic hotdog and drink vendors, foam-cushion seats, automated ticket vendors, and an adjacent shopping center. 2e drawing looks similar to Hofheinz’ new Astrodome, and even to our contemporary “mall parks.” 2e following year, in #e Hustler’s Handbook, Veeck 4atly acknowledged:

2e great portion of any ball game consists of the pitcher holding the ball or throwing it to the catcher. Anything that can somehow turn that frozen tableau into a scene fraught with drama and excitement has solved about 75 percent of your problems.

Such a viewpoint would have been apostasy to the early magnates (and to Roger Angell and Red Barber). Taken together, Veeck’s fantasy-ballpark sketch and this derogatory statement belie his earlier avowals that for him “the game was still the main attraction.” At about the same time that Veeck was propounding his philosophy and drawing imaginary ballparks, Roy Hofheinz was defending his own opinion of the proper balance of the game and ballpark distractions. In a 1966 interview with #e New Yorker’s Angell, the owner of the Astrodome o=ered a revelatory soliloquy:

Why, in most other parks you got nothing to do but watch the game, keep score, and sit on a hard wooden seat. 2is place was built to keep the fans happy. 2ey’ve got our good seats, 5ne restaurants, and our scoreboard to look at, and they don’t have to make a personal sacri5ce to like baseball.

And:

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We’re in the business of sports entertainment. Baseball isn’t a game to which your individuals come alone just to watch the game. 2ey come for social enjoyment. 2ey like to entertain and be entertained at the ballpark.

And:

You’re competing for attention in sports entertainment and you’ve got to create new kinds of fans. We make a big e=ort to bring out the ladies. 2ere are plenty of mothers and grandmothers who have just learned about the double play from some Little Leaguer, and now for the 5rst time here’s a ballpark where you would want to bring them and let them develop into real fans. And once they’ve seen what it’s like here, they won’t feel so bad about letting their husbands and boys go o= to the ball game any old time they want.

Like Veeck, Hofheinz was claiming that ballpark diversions simply provided much-needed enhancement of a dull game watched in hard seats. (Hofheinz also might have said that his promotional methods were indeed limited, as the Sporting News had once urged, to “those which enhance the comfort of the fans and contribute to their enjoyment of the game.”) And like Veeck’s “frozen tableau” comment, Hofheinz’ point that he and his fellow owners were in the business of “sports entertainment,” a form of show business, would have incensed the old magnates. In his interview with Angell, Hofheinz o=ered yet another rationale: that such entertainments, and the Astrodome’s high-toned comforts, bene5tted the game because they lured people to the ballpark out of curiosity and they “would develop into real fans.” 2is remains a

3BB T!" G#$% W!& N"'"$ C()" B(*+ (,- O.!"$ E//(0/ rationalization for certain team owners today. In a 2016 Adweek interview, San Francisco Giants vice president of marketing and advertising Danny Dann said about the team’s AT&T Park: “Casual fans or people who aren’t even fans want to come out to the ballpark because of the hype and the experience. We’ve been able to turn those casual fans into avid fans.” AT&T Park, despite its nostalgic architecture, has its full share of distractions, including, to mention only a few, a giant slide behind left 5eld, a miniature baseball area for children behind the stands, a video game section, televisions for watching the game in restaurants, the de rigueur towering video screen, and an auxiliary board below, on which fans can post public messages between certain innings. It would probably take quite some time for casual fans to 5nally focus on the intricacies of the game amid such distractions. 2e contention that spectacle eventually attracts fans was rebutted by Lasch in his 1977 essay. He believed that luring non-fans into the ballpark by spectacle merely led them to want more spectacle, which in turn led the game to become more of a spectacle, in a “contamination of standards”:

Faced with rising costs, owners seek to increase attendance at sporting events by installing exploding scoreboards, broadcasting recorded cavalry charges, giving away helmets and bats, and surrounding the spectator with cheerleaders, usherettes, and ball girls.… As spectators become less knowledgeable about the games they watch, they become sensation-minded…

Since the time when Lasch wrote, and Veeck and Hofheinz were still 4amboyant rarities, the revolution of

6DD T,#$# U.#/ (! *# % B%118%$- the eighties has ensconced spectacle 5rmly in the ballpark. Today, among owners, there is less pretense, or none, that the game is the main attraction. As far back as the 1990s, the Braves at Turner Stadium had as their slogan, “Not baseball a theme park.” And in 2009, to take just one example, Darcy Raymond, “vice president for branding and fan experience” for the Tampa Bay Rays, stated bluntly in an interview with the New York Times about Tropicana Field, “We want this to be the Walt Disney World of baseball.” He added: “If someone doesn’t know baseball, it’s a pretty boring sport.” And: “You’re really coming to see a show.” Raymond’s words might have been uttered by Veeck or Hofheinz or Van der Ahe; but there is a profound change here, because while the mavericks were fringe voices among the owners, today their vision of the ball game as spectacle has become the norm. Even among those who at least pay lip-service to the old magnates’ view, spectacle is not reviled, as it once would have been, but is seen as merely another, equally valid approach to the conception of the ballpark.

T,# !*.(%71# (,%( 0%7#/ all the mavericks from Von der Ahe onward, though, and which still faces owners, is that as a game, baseball, in its essence, is not a spectacle, and attempts to transform it into one inevitably only partly succeed. A professional sporting event is a show, of course — the old magnates’ denial that they were in “show business” was not entirely true. When Cammeyer’s ballpark yoked the pastime to capitalism, it changed an athletic contest

6D3 T!" G#$% W!& N"'"$ C()" B(*+ (,- O.!"$ E//(0/ in an open 5eld into an athletic entertainment staged for a paying audience. As a show, baseball has been likened not only to the circus, but also, more accurately, to a very di=erent sort of entertainment: the ballet. References to the ballet recur regularly over the decades — a Life magazine photograph caption of August 15, 1938, for example, says that “A baseball ballet was enacted at home plate,” and in the 1980s, the New York Times’ book critic Christopher Lehmann-Haupt wrote of “the entire ballet of baseball.” Similarly, choreographers have celebrated the grace of ballplayers, in Damn Yankees (1955) and other productions. 2e ballet may well be baseball’s closest relation: each ball game tells a wordless story — of a contest, a battle — which is as graceful, as intricate, and as rigidly bound by rules and arcane traditions as classical dance. Like the ballet, the ball game requires of its audience sustained and focused concentration on its story for fullest appreciation. A certain amount of distractions can be accommodated, but beyond that, the game becomes a di=erent type of show, a spectacle. However, the only way to introduce spectacle into the ballpark is to surround this nineteenth-century contest with frantic distractions along its perimeter. 2e result has always been, since Von der Ahe’s Sportsman’s Park, a fractured whole, an only partly successful fusion of di=erent types of shows. A circus spectacle has its own inner logic, but adding spectacle to baseball is like adding jugglers and acrobats to the stage in Swan Lake. You achieve a sort of wild confusion and perhaps elicit amusement, but the ballet continues to tell its story at its own pace — at least until, as Roger Angell warned, its pace is 5nally destroyed for the audience by the distractions. And

6D6 T,#$# U.#/ (! *# % B%118%$- it’s clear we’ve reached this rather extraordinary tipping point, where our great national diversion from modern life has fallen to our plague of modern distractions. It brings home the lesson that even diversions require a certain amount of unbroken concentration to succeed in their light purpose. If our focus is continually fractured, if distractions pile up and up, we are engulfed by pandemonium; the sought- for enjoyment is thwarted; and this too, in its small way, becomes another frustration of modern life. Over several centuries, the word diversion has acquired favorable connotations, of an activity that provides a gentle shift of attention for relief and pleasure from daily anxieties, while distraction often implies a destructive tearing away of one’s focus from its proper target. 2e English magazine Spectator, in August 1893, published an article titled “Distraction and Diversion,” which explored these words’ meanings. 2e meditation was prompted by the “spectacle of a bank holiday.” 2e anonymous author characterized a diversion as an activity that serves an enlightening function, through a Wordsworthian “wise passiveness,” which is arguably too exalted a de5nition for a baseball game; nevertheless, the writer’s distinction of the two words’ associations remains relevant for the ballpark:

In a true distraction you lose yourself, you bewilder yourself, you give yourself up to a giddy whirl of sensuous experiences. In a true diversion you remind yourself of what you really are, of what you really care for outside the sphere of your professional work, of the ideal aims you have in life, of the softer sounds to which the din of the world usually deafens you, of the brighter visions to which the lust of the eye blinds

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you, of the course you wish to steer, of the nature into which you desire to grow. Distractions exhaust, while true diversions nourish the soul.

For the old mavericks and for today’s ballpark owners, the addition of what Veeck termed a “few simple pleasures” — from donkey ball and hog-calling contests to video boards and rock music — has been intended to add minor diversions to the primary diversion of the game; but in their ever more powerful e=ect they have become the destructive distractions of spectacle described by the Spectator’s author — the “giddy whirl of sensuous experiences.”

T,# 7!'($!"#$.+ %*!E( (,# *%118%$-’. balance of game and spectacle has persisted for more than a century and continues today, even after the ballpark has been irreversibly crushed under spectacle. 2e issue has drawn many, sometimes unlikely, parties, which suggests that it carries more signi5cance than a mere divergence of views about a sporting event and its venue’s design. At issue, of course, is a treasured American birthright. 2is old-fashioned word “birthright” was once commonly employed, like the word “patrimony,” to describe the national pastime. Henry Chadwick, the nineteenth-century sportswriter and historian of the game, known as the “father of baseball,” is said to have called baseball “the birthright every American,” a famous phrase echoed over generations. #e Munsey’s Magazine in 1907 printed an article by the journalist Ralph D. Paine titled “2e Reign of Baseball,” in which he wrote: “2e average American boy begins to

6D< T,#$# U.#/ (! *# % B%118%$- play ball at the age of 5ve or six, and he learns the lingo of the game before he can read. 2e lore of the diamond is a birthright from his daddy; and an aptitude for it is in his blood.” It’s true that Albert Spalding and other magnates cynically peddled the notion that baseball was America’s national pastime — Spalding said his main goal in life was to “establish once and for all the American patrimony of the national game” — but the idea preceded even Cammeyer. By the 1850s, baseball was being referred to as the “national pastime.” 2e belief that baseball is a birthright resurfaced promi- nently in 1972, in the landmark case Flood v. Kuhn, a failed challenge to the reserve clause. Justice Harry Blackmun of the United States Supreme Court quoted federal judge Irving Ben Cooper’s poetic tribute to the game, penned two years earlier, as the case was winding through the judicial system:

Baseball has been the national pastime for over one hundred years and enjoys a unique place in our American heritage. Major league professional baseball is avidly followed by millions of fans, looked upon with fervor and pride and provides a special source of inspiration and competitive team spirit especially for the young. Baseball’s status in the life of the nation is so pervasive that it would not strain credulity to say the Court can take judicial notice that baseball is everybody’s business.

Here was an a9rmation by the nation’s highest court that baseball had indeed become the great American game which Spalding and others had sought to establish. As today’s team owners know, baseball lacks the hold on Americans that it had in the eras of Babe Ruth or Mickey

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Mantle, or when the Supreme Court quoted the text above by Judge Cooper. Nevertheless, baseball still has tens of millions of fans, who, while they probably wouldn’t use the words “birthright” or “patrimony” would agree that the game was their inheritance as Americans. If the point needs underscoring, Fenway Park, the oldest surviving jewel box, built in 1912, has been added to the National Register of Historic Places by the National Park Service. Several years ago, the writer George Will, when dis- cussing Wrigley Field’s importance for Chicagoans, was su9ciently moved to reach back to that old word patrimony and to equate the ballpark with the country’s most sacred national symbols. He suggests that Wrigley Field binds “a fragile mosaic of mutually wary neighborhoods into something like a community,” and adds:

2is is why there are many people — many millions, in fact — who rarely or never visit Wrigley Field but for whom this venue is nevertheless somehow important. Similarly, the United States Capitol and the Statue of Liberty are, for scores of millions of Americans who never visit them, reminders of what it means to be an American. For the subset of Americans who are baseball fans, Wrigley Field is an orienting patrimony.

When I had visited Citi Field, my shock, outrage, and dismay were not merely for a lost piece of my boyhood; it was larger than that. It was for a lost birthright. 2ose boyhood hours I spent playing baseball in Washington Square Park, and watching the game at Shea Stadium, and savoring the history books and the baseball cards had all combined to form a deep feeling that baseball was both

6D? T,#$# U.#/ (! *# % B%118%$- intimately mine and something shared as an American — something essentially unchangeable, which would last “forever.” I felt, too, that baseball was the birthright of my son, beside me in the stands, and that his birthright had been destroyed before he had a chance to know it. He wouldn’t know the ballpark as I had — even if it had been only the modernist Shea Stadium, it still had the old jewel- box 4avor of being “away” from the world for a few hours, of watching a ball game rather than an overbearing spectacle. I was left with the vague anger of having been robbed, of being the victim of a theft. But of course, there had been no theft. 2e ballpark, unlike our national parks, our Statue of Liberty, and our Capitol, has remained controlled by private owners and players; it was born of America’s nineteenth- century democratic capitalism and has remained a capitalist creation. It’s simply changed with the times, as it must.

A1(,!E), (,# .(!$+ !0 R&8 V%' W&'-1# seemed an inevitable analogy to my awakening at Citi Field, I came to see a greater similarity to another legendary American 5gure. 2ere is a man in baseball who is, like the “reasonable man” in the law, purely hypothetical. 2is man is a diehard fan or a beloved coach, manager, or player, but in any case this man (it’s always a man) had last seen or played the game in 1880, or 1920, or 1970. And, when the game is facing unsettling changes, some sportswriter perennially asks: what would this Hypothetical Man think if he could see the game as it’s played today — would he recognize it? 2e Hypothetical Man’s imagined answer remains, despite the many changes, a reassuring yes. In 1959, to take one

6D@ T!" G#$% W!& N"'"$ C()" B(*+ (,- O.!"$ E//(0/ example, the American historian Bruce Catton, in an article titled “2e Great American Game,” wrote:

A ga=er from the era of William McKinley, abruptly brought back to the second half of the twentieth century, would 5nd little in modern life that would not seem new, strange, and rather bewildering, but put in a good grandstand seat back of 5rst base he would see nothing that was not completely familiar.

Catton, though, was writing before the multi-sport stadiums of the sixties and the Decibeldome. It was more than a half-century after Catton wrote that I attended the Mets versus Braves game at Citi Field. And thinking of that experience, I feel an a9nity for this “ga=er” — this coach or manager — this Hypothetical Man. I realize that, in a sense, I have somehow become that Hypothetical Man: I have returned to the ballpark after four decades away and I have looked at the game afresh. And if you were to ask me that old question — do I recognize the game? — my answer would be, yes, I do recognize the game on the 5eld; but I don’t recognize many of the sounds and sights in the ballpark.

2017

6DA My Name, My Destiny The age-old search for divine messages in our names

y mother held a mystical belief that our names M in4uence our destiny. She was a sophisticated woman, a writer who lived most of her life in Manhattan and could quote Aristotle and Voltaire; but a part of her mind was as medieval as stained glass, bound to magic and auguries and to the pull of planetary movements on our lives. Her conviction that our names hold celestial codes foretelling our fate was of a piece with her eclectic spirituality. She was intrigued by anagrams and by historical or esoteric reverberations in names, and she would jot them in her diary, and tell me of them when I was growing up. I haven’t followed my mother’s particular spiritualism, although I share her fascination with names. My name- gazing began, no doubt, as a mere mimicking of my mother, but through 5ve decades the habit has become so entrenched that it’s now a re4ex, as mechanical as a knee-jerk to the hammer’s touch, or the pupils’ recalibrations to shifts in

6DB T!" G#$% W!& N"'"$ C()" B(*+ (,- O.!"$ E//(0/ light. My mind instantly starts to dig, like an eager terrier, at the letters in names, and joyfully unearths fresh words or interpretations, oblivious as to whether the results are absurd or, for that matter, in good taste. And I learned long ago that once you begin probing names for heavenly signs you 5nd them in abundance, like the devout who discern the Virgin Mary in everything from window frost to cake frosting. I behold revelations on billboards, shopfronts, subway ads, employee name-tags, and, perhaps most often, in newspapers. For instance, there was the headline, back in 1987, that the economist Alan Greenspan had been appointed Chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve. My immediate, silent response: of course he was. A man with the moniker Greenspan was plainly destined to oversee our greenbacks. Many years later, I had a similar response to news that the Jamaican sprinter Usain St. Leo Bolt had broken three track records at the Beijing Summer Olympics: certainly he did. Who would have expected otherwise? A sprinter blessed with a surname that bottles both lightning and speed itself was surely meant to 4atten track records. For Bolt, like Greenspan, the name seems to hold its bearer’s professional destiny as clearly as if the Fates had spelled it on his forehead at birth. (2e additional fact that Bolt’s middle name of St. Leo echoes the name of the greatest Olympic runner in ancient Greece, Leonidas of Rhodes, seems overkill — a showy 4ourish from Above.) Such obvious alignments of a person’s name and profession are not uncommon. If we turn to American history, we note that the inventor of the nineteenth-century railroad sleeping-car that pulled millions of passengers across the country, and the world, was surnamed Pullman;

63D M+ N%;#, M+ D#.(&'+ the inventor of the telephone, who set bells ringing throughout the globe, was named Bell; the creators of the greatest three-ring circus were the Ringling Brothers; and the 5rst American woman to ride in a spaceship was Sally Ride. Among authors, a young literary man named Wordsworth was unquestionably destined for literary eminence, just as 2omas Chatterton was without doubt fated to chatter away in poetry (and perhaps to die with teeth chattering from a lethal dose of arsenic in a London garret). 2ese sorts of pairings of names and professional destiny are easily noticed by anyone who reads — they are the low-hanging fruit, as it were, for the name-gazer. However, with some 5gurative ladder-climbing we spy more tantalizing pairs. In the history of popular entertainment, for example, the spotlight once shone on the sultry performer Gypsy Rose Lee, whose middle name contains, in scrambled form, the word Eros, the Greek god of love. In the 5eld of science, we encounter the chemist Marie Skłodowska Curie, who discovered radium, and who has the letters for radium itself scattered throughout her name, not to mention cure. T.E. (2omas Edward) Lawrence, the famed “Lawrence of Arabia” who fought the Turks alongside the Arabs in World War I and died in a motorcycle crash, has the letters for camels, sand, desert, war, and crash, strewn across his name. And the Bolivian tycoon Simón Iturri Patiño, known as the “king of tin,” had the letters for tin hidden twice in his name, as though the Higher Powers sought to make doubly certain there would be no slip-ups in this mortal’s destiny.

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I’; '!( "#$.#/ &' 'E;#$!1!)+, cryptography (the study of codes and ciphers), onomastics (the study of names), or anthroponymy (the study of human proper names), and I don’t wish to be. I prefer to skate blithely from name to name, allowing my mind to glean what it may. I don’t use anagram dictionaries or computers, which make the whole endeavor far too easy and dampen the thrill of discovery: a few pages turned or a few taps on a computer keyboard instantly reveal fresh battalions of words waiting and ready. And, in any case, I seldom seek perfect anagrams, which demand that every letter of a name be used exactly once to form a new word. I rely on the so-called imperfect cognate anagram, which doesn’t include each letter of a name but must be relevant to the name’s meaning. 2is species of anagram is less daunting to form than its perfect relative and usually more interesting. It is imperfect, but so is our world, and for me — and perhaps for the powers that be — it’s good enough. Yet I go further: I habitually listen for aural double- meanings, or homophones, no matter how tenuous. Was it mere chance, for instance, that the New York 5nancial charlatan who notoriously made o= with billions of dollars of others’ savings is named Bernard Mado$? Or, take the related subjects of air, of 4ight, of avians, and the curtain pulls back for Fred Astaire, who was said to “dance on air” and whose name both spells air and sounds like it. 2e aviatrix Amelia Earhardt also has both the sound of air and the word’s letters in her name, albeit in scrambled form. Aviator Charles Lindbergh’s name lacks the sound of air but carries the letters, along with those of bird, and if we add Lindbergh’s middle name, Augustus, we can spot an eagle,

636 M+ N%;#, M+ D#.(&'+ which is especially apropos, given Lindbergh’s nickname of “2e Lone Eagle.” To follow this 4ight of fancy further: the 5rst explorer to soar over the North Pole was Admiral Richard Byrd, in 1929. Or consider Sir Edmund Percival Hillary, the 5rst person to scale Mount Everest, in 1953. His full, titled name possesses air and also hill, ascend, rise, alps, alpine — a name thoroughly packed with snowy vistas, craggy peaks, white in5nities. We also 5nd the letters for Nepal and even for Himalay, an Anglo-American spelling of the mountain range common in the nineteenth century. However, his name does not spell Everest itself, falling short by one e and one t. But Sir Edmund was accompanied on his climb by Nepalese Sherpa Tenzing Norgay, who brings us the missing letters. And, since theirs was a joint undertaking — the two men climbed literally roped together — it seems still more apt that only together do their names form that of the mountain they conquered. As it happens, there are many cases of two individuals whose names must be combined to fully reveal their interlocked fortunes. Clyde Chestnut Barrow o=ers some food for thought (rob, rod, lead, death, car, shot), as does Bonnie Elizabeth Parker (rob, bail, bank, trap), but only when united do they form “Bonnie and Clyde” and the concealed, complete description: two bank robbers. (Of course, adding names also adds letters and, therefore, interpretive possibilities, ultimately leading to futility; with this in mind, I’ve refused to contemplate the staggering anagram potential of Pablo Picasso’s full name: Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso.)

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Connecting two people by their names can have comic results. A book published in 1977, Remarkable Names of Real People, or How to Name Your Baby, by John Train, purports to list actual individuals’ names and professions, including an iceman preposterously named I.C. Shivers. Among other entries are a detective agency named after its principals, Wyre & Tapping; a law 5rm, Lawless and Lynch; and a plumbing company, Plummer & Leek. Like Greenspan, Bolt, and Pullman, such names, with their strange aptness, beg for explanation. One theory, which appeared in the early twentieth century and is sometimes called nominative determinism, argues that people unconsciously choose their professions to match their names. 2e psychologist Carl Jung toyed with this idea in his 1952 work on synchronicity, or “meaningful coincidences,” remarking that the areas of study chosen by him and two famous colleagues accorded with their names: “Herr Freud (Joy) champions the pleasure principle, Herr Adler (Eagle) the will to power, Herr Jung (Young) the idea of rebirth.” Jung admitted that he was in “something of a quandary” about what to conclude from these concurrences, but I clearly see a hidden hand at work — not a disembodied creative spirit, but a meddlesome force, the God of the Bible illustrations, the stern graybeard gazing down from the sky — but with a playful twinkle in His eye. (2is patriarchal God, mingling in my early memory with pictures of Moses, was engraved in my mind; for me, God will always have the pronoun He.) But can we really suppose that God would descend to burlesque name-humor, as with Messrs. Plummer and

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Leek? Didn’t God’s 2ird Commandment, forbidding His name from being taken in vain, show us that names, for Him, were no laughing matter? Yet in recent decades, Bible scholars have increasingly uncovered passages of purported humor in both testaments. 2ey point out that God Himself is described more than once as laughing, such as (rather vindictively) in the Psalms: “2e Lord shall laugh at him: for he seeth that his day is coming.” And He did apparently delight in mischievous name-play. 2e name Noah, for instance, means “comfort” in Hebrew, but if the letters are reversed, they form the word “grace,” which may add a new gloss on the Flood story. Anagrams like these were for centuries a part of rabbinical study of the Bible and other sacred texts. But some Biblical names don’t require rabbis for exegesis: they openly and cruelly display the person’s character or destiny, or both. In the Book of Samuel, the surly and rather dense husband of Abigail was called Nabal, a Hebrew word for “fool” or “scoundrel” (“For as his name is, so is he,” Abigail says of him, “Nabal is his name, and folly is within him”); Job gave their third daughter the name Keren-Happuch, meaning, roughly, horn of eye-shadow, or horn of cosmetics, or the power of mascara. We are not told her tale, although we can certainly imagine her character. No loving parent would burden a child with such an outrageous name unless it was the will of God (cf. Moby Dick, in which the evil, ill-fated Captain Ahab was named for the evil, ill-fated Biblical king only at the “foolish, ignorant whim” of his “crazy” mother). In the New Testament, too, names are loaded with profound implications for the bearer’s destiny. Jesus (whose

63> T!" G#$% W!& N"'"$ C()" B(*+ (,- O.!"$ E//(0/ teachings clearly show a sense of humor), changed Simon’s name to Peter, which in Aramaic, as translated into Greek (Petros), is “rock.” 2is was an unlikely nickname, since Simon (“he has heard”) was excitable and hardly rock-like. When Jesus made his purpose explicit — “And I say also unto thee, 2at thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church” — it might have been seen as a disastrous mistake or as a mocking joke against Simon to be followed by a burst of apostolic laughter. (2e English essayist Charles Lamb said in an 1826 letter that the re-naming of Simon as Rock “sancti5es Punning with me against all gainsayers.”) But after being re-named Rock, Simon did become a 5g- urative rock of the church. His new name rede5ned him, changed his fate. Viewed from the Bible’s framework, the existence of a couple of pipe-5xers named Plummer and Leek — who conjure a sort of Laurel and Hardy comic duo — 5ts with His demonstrated propensity for impish names, as with Abigail’s “Fool” and Job’s “Mascara Girl.”

A. % 7,&1/ !0 (,# ;!/#$' %)#, I’m skeptical of the miracle-working God of the Bible who directs our lives, and perhaps even chooses our names through unwitting parents. Yet, when letters of a name suddenly rearrange themselves into revelatory meaning, I am, for that instant of shock and awe, as staunch a believer as any Bible-pounding evangelical at a camp meeting. Lecture me on the silence and hiddenness of God, expound Newton’s clockwork universe, explicate Nietzsche’s death of God — I turn a deaf ear. At that instant, the Age of Miracles isn’t over — there are wonders in names like Plummer and Leek. 2ey are

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God’s winks and nudges, sent to guide our destinies and remind us of His presence. Nevertheless, a wink and nudge on a plumber’s shop sign lacks the impact and clarity of, say, a voice from a whirlwind or plagues of frogs and locusts. And that’s the trouble with seeking name-messages: they’re usually allusive, ambiguous, raising mere tantalizing hints of His intentions. 2ey generally lack the de5nitiveness of His old-school grand gestures, the in-your-face stunts, like turning people into pillars of salt or making a donkey speak to the prophet Balaam (a scene that might have been dreamed up by Hollywood gag-writers). If the Lord is up to something with the name Alan Greenspan, what exactly is it? Why does Elvis Aaron Presley hold both evil and savior? Was cosmic irony at play when the doctor who recognized “attention de5cit hyperactivity disorder” in 1902 was named Dr. Still? What are we supposed to do with this fragmentary information? Name anagrams and allusions lift us to a pitch of unnerved speculation, but we lack a parting of the Red Sea, a voice from a 4aming bush. 2ey are similar in e=ect to certain strange, famous historical facts, such as that presidents Adams, Je=erson, and Monroe all died on July Fourth. We are left to ponder and puzzle. For me, His oblique, subtle, post-Biblical style of com- municating through names brings to mind an incident concerning a great track runner from long before Bolt: the Australian John Landy. In the 1954 British Empire and Commonwealth Games, Landy lost the one-mile race to English rival Roger Bannister because he glanced backward just before reaching the 5nish line, which cost Landy a crucial split-second. Appropriately, Landy’s name, including

63@ T!" G#$% W!& N"'"$ C()" B(*+ (,- O.!"$ E//(0/ his middle name, Michael, holds the cry, “one inch, lad!” It seems to me that Landy, instead of being turned into pillar of salt, as was Lot’s wife was for violating God’s command, was turned into a 5gurative goat for violating the unwritten law of a contest that’s rooted in ancient Greek religious rites. In probing name-anagrams in the post-Biblical world, we must accept His modern, diagonal, sly, literary mode of messaging.

T,# G$##-. %'/ R!;%'., like the authors of the Bible, knew that a good laugh was enjoyed not only by mortals but also in the higher realms. 2ey told stories like the one about Hermes, who stole Apollo’s cattle and, according to one version of the tale, made the animals walk backward to avoid detection by their retreating hoof-prints. 2e Greek pantheon even included a god of satire and mockery, Momus (named Querella by the Romans), until an irritated Zeus ousted him from Mount Olympus. Word play, ingenious tricks, and Sphinx riddles were all indulged. And the classical gods were even more meddlesome in human a=airs than the Biblical God. 2ey were changeable, hot- tempered, petty, and cruel. 2e ancients turned to various forms of divination to 5gure out what the gods wanted, so they could have a modicum of peace and quiet. 2ey pestered oracles, they interpreted dreams, they searched tea leaves and sheep entrails, they scoured words and, of course, they scrutinized names. 2e Romans even had a saying, probably coined by the comic playwright Plautus, nomen atque omen, which translates as “the name is the destiny,” or “the omen is in the name.” But this idea, that

63A M+ N%;#, M+ D#.(&'+ names and fates are linked, emerges far earlier than Plautus. At the birth of Western literature, the Greek tragedian Aeschylus, in Agamemnon, has the chorus ruminate about the source and signi5cance of the name of Helen of Troy, whose otherworldly beauty had caused the Trojan War. Aeschylus plays on the name’s root meaning, in Greek, to “seize” or “destroy.” 2e passage is presented this way in the 1926 translation by Herbert Weir Smyth:

Who can have given a name so altogether true — was it some power invisible guiding his tongue aright by forecasting of destiny? — who named that bride of the spear and source of strife with the name of Helen? For, true to her name, a Hell she proved to ships, Hell to men, Hell to city…

2e yoking of names and destiny, and the importance of correctly interpreting this connection, is central to a story told by a later Greek, Plutarch, about a campaign of Alexander the Great. In 332 B.C., the Macedonian king had laid siege to the stubbornly combative Phoenician port city of Tyre (the stubbornly combative baseball legend Tyrus Cobb was named after the city). Alexander was concerned over whether he would be victorious, and ordered his soothsayers to decipher a dream. In this dream, Alexander, after much e=ort, captured a satyr, the wild, Dionysian creature of Greek mythology, part man and part horse or goat. 2e soothsayers based their reading of the dream on the meaning of the beast’s name. 2ey broke the word into two parts: sa (in Greek, you, or you possess) and tyre (the name of the besieged city in question) and they determined that the capture of the satyr portended

63B T!" G#$% W!& N"'"$ C()" B(*+ (,- O.!"$ E//(0/ that Alexander would possess Tyre. And so it came to pass that Tyre was taken. Message received. Plutarch’s story shows one way the classical gods deployed names through dreams to convey their intentions. Or perhaps it shows the insane lengths to which humans will go in seeking divine directives in names. After learning of the story of Alexander’s soothsayers, I concluded that no name-interpretation is too far-fetched. If you study a name for dei5c import and come up empty-handed or with results that are suspect or contradictory, it simply means you haven’t taken the search far enough. And you can take each search onward forever. 2ere are no 5nal defeats in name word-games — although there are no irrefutable proofs, either.

A'%)$%;. %$# !'1+ !'# !0 % ;#'%)#$&# of word games, such as palindromes, chronograms, pangrams, and acrostics, which have been popular for centuries in the West as sources of entertainment and enlightenment, or as codes for protecting secrets. 2e ancient Greeks toyed with anagrams, as did early Christians, who, like the rabbis, hunted the Bible for truths concealed in words and numbers. (Famously, in John 18:38, Pilate asks Jesus, “Quid est veritas?” (“What is truth?”), a question which contains its own answer if the letters are rearranged: “Est qui vir adest.” (“2e man who is before you.”)) In the Renaissance and later, learned European gentlemen sought diversion by intermingling Greek, Latin, English, French, and other languages in witty and thought- provoking word play. According to an 1862 book by Henry

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Benjamin Wheatley titled, Of Anagrams: a monograph treating of their history from the earliest ages to the present time, the French king Louis XIII went so far as to employ a salaried court anagramist, one 2omas Billon, for royal amusement. John Donne wrote a poem “2e Anagram,” in which he rhymed of a lady:

Though all her parts be not in th’ usuall place, She’hath yet an Anagram of a good face.

Lewis Carroll, 2ackeray, Swift, Stendhal, and many other literary eminences have felt the allure of word play — Lewis Carroll’s ingenious anagram for Florence Nightingale was “Flit on, cheering angel.” (But John Dryden, for one, did not share the enjoyment: in his satire Mac Flecknoe, he swiped at those who would “torture one poor word ten thousand ways”; and 2omas De Quincey likened the game called a lipogram to an act of “wild bravado” and dismissed it as “a rope-dancing feat of some verse writers.”) I’m grateful for my ignorance. If I were well-versed in Greek, Latin, and European tongues, I might well lose my sanity amid the multiplicity of word plays possible across languages. An example is Max Schreck, the actor who achieved lasting fame as the vampire in the 1922 horror 5lm Nosferatu, and whose last name, in German, means, too perfectly, fright. Or there’s Andrew Carnegie, the steel baron who became for a time the world’s richest man. His name, rearranged, yields many English words — gainer, aim, eager — but none quite apt for his extraordinary journey from a cottage in a Scottish town, where his father was a

663 T!" G#$% W!& N"'"$ C()" B(*+ (,- O.!"$ E//(0/ poor weaver, to kingly wealth in America. Yet Carnegie’s name hides the Old Irish word, airgead, a term for silver, or money. And so, with just a pinch of Gaelic added, we taste the truth. And if I was 4uent in Middle French, I could read the original text of the predictions of Nostradamus. According to his followers, the sixteenth-century oracle predicted the rise of Napoléon Bonaparte (Bonaparte = good solution) through an anagram of three French towns — Pau, Nay, and Loron — which become, when rearranged, Napaulon Roi, or, in modern English, “Napoleon, the King.” Not all name etymologies lead back to classical languages, but a large portion do. Charles Francis Richter, inventor of the Richter scale, which measures seismic activity, has within his name the word seiein, a Greek word meaning “to shake.” Or there are the French 5lm pioneers the Lumière brothers, Auguste and Louis, whose surname is the French word for light, which in turn derives from the Latin stem lumen — light, the basis of 5lm. And there is also the American 5lmmaker Sidney Lumet — but enough; it sets the mind spinning. No, I’m content on my familiar little acre of modern English. With name anagrams, erudition could well become a path to madness.

I’"# *##' %/;!'&.,#/ that, notwithstanding Fool or Mascara Girl, or Simon’s metamorphosis into a rock, there cannot possibly be a higher will living secretly within our names. How could our fates be contained in a mere jumble of squiggles and dots, which are our signatures, or in the brutish grunts and hisses by which we address one another?

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To this, I ask: don’t we believe in just such a mystical connection when we name our children in the 5rst place? Certain cultures, by tradition, have con5ned children’s names to re4ect birth-order or identity within a clan, and so forth. But parents in many, perhaps most, countries today have nearly unlimited freedom of choice. And we seem naturally inclined to choose names that represent some sort of good, while bad names, like Ahab, are chosen only by “crazy” mothers. We bestow on a child those symbols and sounds that represent a beloved relative, or an admired historical, religious, or cultural 5gure, or a special place, or an abstract virtue, as the Puritans did with names like Prudence, Temperance, and Fortitude. A child may be named for an object of beauty in the natural world, a benevolent god, or, as in China and elsewhere, in accordance with auspicious, or lucky, numbers, and astrology. However, all such names are freighted with the same parental hope that these squiggles and dots and noises combine to numinously bless the child with a portion of the good within its namesake — with a similar beauty, or power, or upright character, or distinguished future. 2e name is a magic charm, it is the child, just as the voodoo doll is the victim and the icon is the saint. The writer Ralph Waldo Ellison was named in honor of Ralph Waldo Emerson because his father wanted to ensure, through a name, that his son would become a poet. (A contrarian note to such parental ambition for o=spring was sounded by Charles Lamb, who facetiously said in an essay in praise of leisure that he would name any son of his “Nothing to Do.”)

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Yet what of our free will? Even if we concede a belief in the mystical power of names, we still usually choose any name we wish for our children, from Scheherazade to Skipper. Surely our names are not entirely predestined? Surely we’re not merely slaves for His will? Of course we’re not. We’re prisoners of His will. Our earthly situation has been likened to that of an inmate in a cell: we exercise choice, but it’s limited. 2is idea, that our actions are ultimately constrained by a Higher Power, recurs through history, from the Biblical proverb, “A man’s heart deviseth his way: but the Lord directeth his steps,” to 2omas à Kempis’ tidy “man proposes, but God disposes,” to Hamlet’s “2ere is a divinity that shapes our ends, rough- hew them how we will.” Our freedom extends only until it threatens to botch His Plan. We can choose to name our daughter Jezebel or our son Jupiter, but if it happens to be the wrong name for His inscrutable purpose, it won’t stand. In Genesis, God gave Adam freedom to name all the animals as he pleased — but if Adam had chosen to call a baby lamb an “Eve” instead of a “Ewe,” you can be sure God would have been all over that, thundering that He had a Plan for that name. A wrong name throws a wrench in the cosmic gears, potentially bringing the whole works to a shuddering halt. A 5x is required, sooner or later. Hence, the name change, to nudge His creation back on track. Among some peoples, name changes are performed as a coming of age ritual, or with each new stage of life, serving as a sort of gentle realignment with the cosmos. But in the West, a name change — except for a spouse’s surname-change at marriage — is generally an adult individual’s very personal act. Often, the change is too

66< M+ N%;#, M+ D#.(&'+ trivial to a=ect His plan, and seems indeed a choice freely made. 2us, Caroline Astor, once arbiter of New York Society’s “four hundred,” sni=ed at her husband’s middle name, “Backhouse,” for its supposedly vulgar connotations, and compelled him to not to use it — a negligible 5ne-tuning, met with acquiescent silence from Above. Other changes, though, do suggest a Higher Power at work. And what better place to mine for fateful name changes than Old Hollywood? 2e studio executives well understood the mystical power of names. 2ey rou- tinely manipulated those of actors, partly as a mild sort of ethnic cleansing in a Protestant-dominated country, but also for aesthetics, to beautify a name. Somehow, Frances Gumm seems less lovely than Judy Garland; Archie Leach lacks the crisp English elegance of Cary Grant; Doris Day glows with a sunny glamor absent from Mary Ann Kappelho=. Were these adjustments simply a publicist’s decision, or was that hidden hand setting right certain wayward birth names? Did the same Power that in the Bible changed Simon to Rock later change Roy Scherer to Rock Hudson? Today, we can’t quite imagine a marquee lit-up with Pillow Talk starring Roy Scherer and Mary Ann Kappelho=. Nor can we quite imagine #e Wizard of Oz starring Frances Gumm, or To Catch a #ief starring Archie Leach. Surely their name changes were in the stars? Would Fred Astaire have become a screen icon if his mother had kept his surname, Austerlitz? Would Ginger Rogers — born Virginia McMath — have been teamed with her great dance partner if her mother hadn’t married a man surnamed Rogers? Can we believe the duo would have lit up 1930s movie screens as

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“AUSTERLITZ AND MCMATH”? 2ey sound like two opposing cavalry generals. Some might protest that this view of destiny falls into the trap of “hindsight bias,” or “retrospective determinism” — the conclusion that because events happened as they did, they must have happened as they did. After all, why should it have been inevitable that Austerlitz and McMath had their birth names changed? Why shouldn’t Frances Gumm have appeared on #e Wizard of Oz marque? A refutation of this argument is Julia Turner. Turner, like many so many other young Hollywood actors in the thirties, changed her name. Afterward, as “Lana” Turner, she immediately gained fame and riches as Hollywood’s “sweater girl,” for the suggestive wool sweater she wore in her 5rst feature 5lm, #ey Won’t Forget. Turner would say that when she chose the name Lana, she did not know that it is both the Spanish word for “wool” and Mexican slang for “money.” But it’s easy to envision her at her director’s o9ce, suggesting the new name and setting the heavenly gears and dials whirring and recalibrating. Turner recalled how she chose “Lana”: “Out of nowhere a name came into my head — as clearly as though God had decided to speak to me.”

S!;#(&;#., (,!E),, % '%;# 7,%')# leads to unintended consequences. Consider Tenzing Norgay, the Nepalese guide who scaled Everest with Sir Edmund Hillary. Norgay was given the birth name Namgyal Wangdi. A Buddhist priest later advised his parents that the boy was the reincarnation of a rich man who had recently died in a nearby province, and

66? M+ N%;#, M+ D#.(&'+ therefore his name should be altered. 2e priest suggested Tenzing Norgay, which means “wealthy follower of religion” (and which contains the letters e and t, lacking in Hillary’s name to spell Everest). Norgay, however, did not become a follower of religion, wealthy or otherwise. Why did the priest’s careful plan collapse? We know the answer: man proposes, but God disposes. 2e English Himalayan mountaineer Eric Earle Shipton (whose name, it might be noted, forms the word “Sherpa”) was the 5rst to hire Norgay as a guide, and he recounted the “prophetic” story in his autobiography:

There was another prophetic incident. From a hundred applicants, we chose fifteen Sherpas to accompany the expedition from Darjeeling. Nearly all of them were old friends … but there was one Tibetan lad of nineteen, a newcomer, chosen largely because of his attractive grin. His name is Tensing Norkay [sic].

It’s clear that Norgay’s broad grin determined his path — and Hillary’s, as well — a grin which became world famous from news photographs after the conquest of Everest. And predictably, the word grin is sprinkled through the name Tenzing Norgay and lacking in Namgyal Wangdi. 2e Tibetan priest, con5dent that he was shaping a boy’s future in one direction, inadvertently set him on a quite di=erent, and surely predestined, course. At Everest’s summit, Hillary took an iconic picture of Norgay. His face is hidden behind an oxygen mask and hood, but surely he must have broken into a weary grin at that triumphal moment. And I wonder if there might be another grin hidden in this photograph, just beyond the

66@ T!" G#$% W!& N"'"$ C()" B(*+ (,- O.!"$ E//(0/ vacant blue stratosphere — perhaps the same watchful grin that had seen Balaam’s ass speak and Job name his daughter Mascara Girl. I 5nd it a beguiling image, as I do so many born of anagrams — a teenage girl taking her Hollywood name and sending the vast celestial apparatus wildly recalibrating her destiny, or a poor weaver and his wife in a candle-lit Scottish cottage unknowingly giving their boy in his cradle a Gaelic password to a fortune worthy of King Solomon. I realize, of course, that such images are mere whimsy. And I know, despite my mother’s view to the contrary, that searching for transcendent signi5cance in names is on par with reading the future in cloud formations or seeing divine anger in thunderstorms. Still, my old habit persists, irrepressible and impervious to argument. I know I will always paw at names and probe for anagrams. And I’ll always feel a weird chill when the letters of a name are suddenly uncloaked to reveal a message that, in its uncanny appropriateness, could only have come from On High.

2019

66A The Choice A mother’s secret suitor emerges in pages from the past

n the fall of 1956, my mother was a nineteen-year-old I college girl living in New York, anguishing over a choice of two marriage proposals. One was from a young man named Jan DeVries, a 4amboyant theater student with a sweep of gold hair who sang Troubadour songs with a lilting tenor voice and strummed a guitar; the other was from a literature student named Arno Karl, a poet who wore black, sported a black Beatnik goatee, scowled at life, and quoted Rimbaud. 2ey were as di=erent as a bright spring morning and a stormy winter night, and they awakened her love precisely because of their stark opposites. My mother already had Jan’s engagement ring; they had planned to marry in April. But during the summer, she’d met and fallen in love with Arno — my father — at a college party in Manhattan, and they’d spent three euphoric weeks together, roaming the city and lying abed in my father’s sublet apartment, while Jan was in Chicago, working at a little theater. 2ose weeks were “desperate, fugitive, and slightly hysterical,” my mother would recall in her diary,

66B T!" G#$% W!& N"'"$ C()" B(*+ (,- O.!"$ E//(0/ because at their end, they knew, my father would sail for Paris, to study French literature at the Sorbonne for seven months. On the pier by the freighter, my father, too, had proposed, urging my mother to break her engagement to Jan. She had accepted but was uncertain. Now, that fall, she found herself in a strange city, far from her family, and suddenly confronting a fork in life’s road, with a young man beckoning on each path. 2e passing days advanced her inexorably toward what appeared an impossible decision. “2e frightening thing about the question is the feeling that in making up my mind about the two, I make up my mind about the life I will lead,” she con5ded in her diary. “Time is 4ying too fast. Never has the future been so totally unknown to me. I am nearing a step which will shape the rest of my life. So much hinges on this choice.” My mother’s agonies over her suitors 5ll most of her diary during this period and came as a shock when I read through my parents’ papers nearly sixty years later. My parents, divorced and estranged since my earliest memory, had kept from their two sons almost everything about their early relationship. Exploring their papers after their deaths, I learned they had also concealed that their mother had once deeply loved, and very nearly married, a young man other than their father. Now, this young man was stepping forth from the pages of the past, from the love letters and diaries of three teenagers written long ago.

A *1%7--%'/-C,&(# .'%8.,!( 4uttered out from one of Jan DeVries’ letters when I opened it. 2e photo showed a slender, pale young man with 5ne features, wearing a

6:D T,# C,!&7# loose, white, collared shirt open at the neck. His hair is wind-tousled, and he faces the camera with a disarming, winning smile. He appears a rather dashing, romantic 5gure, with a hint of the aesthete’s fragility; he reminded me of the English actor Leslie Howard or the poet Rupert Brooke. One could see how he would captivate college girls. He certainly captivated my mother. She dreamed of writing novels, but she also shared Jan’s love of the theater — she acted in campus Shakespeare productions, typed out plays and stories, and ran with the high-spirited theatrical and literary sets at Antioch College, in Ohio, where she, Jan, and my father were students. At any other college during the mid-5fties — the heart of America’s Eisenhower era, when college boys wore sport coats and ties, and “coeds” wore long skirts and cardigans — these three would have been exotic birds, whispered about as “beatniks,” “folkies,” “Leftists,” “Communists”; at Antioch, they were hardly noticed. 2e small, bucolic college had gained national notoriety as a politically radical, bohemian enclave (a folk-dancing class, held on a campus lawn, was among my mother’s courses). Antioch was also renowned for high academic standards and a pioneering “cooperative education” program, by which students rotated semesters of traditional coursework with jobs or study beyond campus. 2e program had scattered Jan DeVries to Chicago, my father to Paris, and my mother to Manhattan, and a clerical position at an insurance company. She was living on West Fifty-seventh Street, sharing a nineteenth-century artist’s studio — rambling, high-ceilinged, large-windowed — with four other Antioch girls. 2ey, like my mother, had been placed in o9ce jobs and dreamed of literary or stage triumphs. “2ere is always something exciting going on

6:3 T!" G#$% W!& N"'"$ C()" B(*+ (,- O.!"$ E//(0/ here at the studio,” my mother recorded shortly after she arrived, “with people always coming and going, and there are lots of parties.” At one of these parties, my mother had met my father. Many of his letters from Paris — like Jan’s letters from Chicago — are addressed to her at the studio, and my mother mentions in her diary that she usually 5nds her lovers’ envelopes “side by side together in the mailbox,” adding, “if they only knew — My God.” In fact, her rivals’ love letters were destined to remain together, side by side, for nearly six decades, 5rst in her mailbox, then stored her closet, and 5nally, following her death, in mine. My mother had kept Jan’s correspondence in four tall stacks, in precise chronological order, according to their envelopes’ postmarks. Each stack was bound, rather quaintly, with a burgundy-red ribbon, of the sort girls once commonly used to save letters from boyfriends. When I eventually decided to read Jan’s letters, and those of my parents, I had to 5rst overcome the ribbons’ petri5ed bows. After some tugging, one of them 5nally released its exhausted embrace, and the freed envelopes spilled across the table. I removed the top letter from its envelope and unfolded it gingerly — the cheap paper tended to split at the creases from its own weight and 4ake o= at the edges at the slightest touch; it was like holding a crumbling medieval document. But Jan’s words remained young and alive, a person reawakening from a deep freeze. He jokes, teases, recounts salacious college gossip; he wryly sketches his life in Chicago, where he rents Spartan rooms with two other theater students; he quotes Shakespeare; he

6:6 T,# C,!&7# pledges his devotion, tells my mother how he yearns for her, how he continually thinks of her. He addresses her as “My Love,” and signs it, “Your loving Jan.” As I open more letters, I’m baFed by many references — to people, places, events — I’m like a latecomer at a play. I’m not yet familiar with all the characters — I know nothing of Jan DeVries, or why he and my mother are living in far-4ung cities, or other basic exposition. Still, it’s immediately plain that this young man DeVries is in a passionate romance with my mother:

My life is much richer since I have known you — everything I see has become tempered by having you to refer it to. It’s wonderful for me — this is the 5rst time in my life that I have ever loved a person fully. Everyone I have ever known and loved before was just a preparation for you. I love you. Your absence hits me in waves — I can’t think coherently for part of me is gone.

Jan’s hundreds of handwritten or typed pages burn with such adoring passages. He delighted in antiquated, poetic language, and his missives are, in places, reminiscent of Keats’ letters to Fanny Brawne:

A sweet good evening to you my love, It is good to sit here and talk to you, removed though you are; I can see your face, gentle and strong, before me as I sit here, and from a thousand miles, you trans5gure the room to a warm glade, languorous and dripping with spring 4owers. If ever you were a 4ower, though, in some ancient incarnation, it must have been the frangipani….and so love, to bed with mee — the wind whistles through the stars by my window but I’ll dream of thee.

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In another letter, after playfully mimicking a Shakespearean sonnet and quoting the Song of Songs, he appends a mock-Biblical embellishment:

I love you! And by my now-hairless chin, I would walk the plains of Ohio to claim you, yea, I would renounce all my birthright, home and friends to be with you this evening. For thou art comely my love, and thou hast a peace about you which soothes my irritated brain.

He speaks of their impending marriage, which they have kept hidden from their parents: “Do you realize if all goes well, in less than a year from now we will be married? I can’t imagine a better month than April in which to get married.” And, a few days later: “We’ll have to do quite a bit of thinking about planning future jobs, etc., if we do get married in April. But 5rst, last, and in the middle, I love you. Oh, April.” In one letter, he reminisces about their romance on campus and imagines their mornings together once they’re married:

I remembered — God how I remembered! — you laughing, you crying, you biting into an apple, us kissing, us taking walks, us 5ghting, us making love, and most nice, you waking up. 2at’s going to be the nicest part of being married to you — you waking up every morning. You’ll sit in the middle of a huge bed and we’ll laugh with each other. Wonderful!

My mother, initially, writes regularly to Jan (although I’ve found none of her letters to him), and he treasures her notes: “Today there was the best letter I ever received in my life — what a beautiful gift you have for putting

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intangibles on paper. More than ever I am sure you are going to be a really great writer. Oh, we’ll make quite a pair, my betrothed. Let us hope our destiny will complement each other — such a fate seems so concrete and possible now, so much so that I hardly dare to believe in it.” I, too, hardly dared to believe in their wedding plans. At Jan’s 5rst reference to their impending marriage, I’d been taken aback, and tried to convince myself of his words’ reality. Even after the disbelief had faded, each time I saw in Jan’s letters the words “engagement” and “marriage” and “my betrothed,” I felt an angry little twinge in some deep place, a disturbance of ancient family loyalties. It was a child’s resentment of a duplicitous mother on behalf of his father; but this was mingled with something else — a shameful guilt toward my father for the a=ection and sympathy I had quickly developed for good-natured Jan. His letters revealed that he was indeed a charming young man, literate, romantic, yet agreeably easygoing, with an appealing, self-deprecating humor. Poor Jan! He and his “betrothed,” I knew, would not make “quite a pair,” their destinies would not “complement each other.” I increasingly had an impulse to warn him, to take him aside, like a friend — I had begun to consider him as such — and alert him to the heartbreak that lay ahead. “Stop this hopeless dreaming!” I’d silently plead, “Spare yourself misery!” Ludicrous, of course, to warn a teenager of a danger that had passed almost sixty years earlier. But during the evenings that I explored this archive, I often lost my bearings. I’d open a few letters and begin sinking

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back into the world of these three adolescents in the 1950s, re-entering the drama of their love-triangle, with its subplots (will Jan be given the chance to direct a play at the theater? Will my mother’s mother recover from her cancer?) and its seemingly stock comic characters (the nosy concierge at my father’s Paris hotel; the martinet stage manager at the theater where Jan worked; the boy-crazy girls who share the studio with my mother and always seem on the brink of breaking spontaneously into a Busby Berkeley musical number). 2e daily packets from Jan and my father usually run several pages and provide rich detail of their lives, which often have a youthfully chaotic, rushing-out-the-door-and- through-the-street sort of quality. If at 5rst I was baFed by references to people, places, and events, like a latecomer to a play, I was soon quite at ease. Indeed, I came to know nearly everything about them — certainly more than their own parents had then known. I knew the weather each day and how their rooms were furnished, the books they were studying and their opinions of them, their night dreams and daydreams, their childhood memories and their meals, their bank balances and the brands of cigarettes they smoked and their career ambitions. And I learned more about Jan DeVries. Of Dutch ancestry, he had grown up in a tree-shaded Midwestern town, where his father owned a hardware store on the main street. His parents opposed his theatrical ambitions as impractical. I even unearthed a note from Jan’s father to him, in which he a=ectionately warns his boy against the “perils” of a career on the stage, and which Jan had sent

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on to my mother. (Jan’s father seemed a genial, avuncular sort of man, and I took a liking to him, too.) Each evening, as I opened envelopes and read the pages, my apartment would fade away and only the page I held would shine under the lamp; then the page itself would vanish as I fully entered their world — the mid-twentieth-century world, a world both familiar and strangely archaic, where people traveled by freighter or ocean liner and received telegrams, where long-distance calls were rare, expensive, and required shouting into the phone to heard, where Broadway was still king, and where middle-class college students like my parents were commonly married by graduation, and young women took stenography courses just in case. It was the world of early black-and-white television, the morning and evening newspapers, telephone exchange names, and the white-coated milkman. 2at this world I was visiting had receded into the distant past was evident by the age-darkened papers covered with cursive handwriting or typed with portable typewriters. But in their youthful lives everything was exciting and new and happening just today, last night, tomorrow — it was as though I were opening the envelopes of letters that had just been posted, reading journal and diary entries just written. I became a secret sharer of their lives; I myself was somehow younger, a college student experiencing their days with them, at their sides, and inwardly responding to them. I had only to pick up the phone to call them; I had only to pick up a pen to send a letter myself. One day, when Jan was caught in an afternoon shower without

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an umbrella on his way home from work at the theater, I found myself thinking Jan, you must buy an umbrella! As though it had just happened. My relationship with these three young people — and with time and reality itself, during those evening hours — became complicated, ever-shifting, unstable. Certainly, I was much of the time simply reading about my parents and Jan DeVries in a straightforward way. But often I was disconcerted and made vaguely uneasy by my parents, who had been transmuted back into raw adolescents, who were similar, but not quite the same, as the parents I’d known growing up. And sometimes I’d half-forget that these were the letters of my parents, indeed of real people, and I’d turn pages with the suspense of one absorbed in an epistolary novel. I knew, of course, that the tale was real — and would end with my parents’ marriage — but I didn’t know just how events would advance toward that end. I was watching destiny work itself out day by day, letter by letter, silently inching forward through the clamor and confusions of daily life, with all its quotidian tasks and concerns and passing pleasures — the evening subway-ride home, the last-minute change of travel plans, the leisurely Sunday-morning breakfast, the delicious dream punctured by the shrill alarm, the misunderstandings and quarrels and reconciliations. Watching the past unfold toward the present, I predictably had, on occasion, something like the perspective of an omniscient oracle, a god watching from on high, a remote observer of these students launching out into adult life, who can’t know what the next day holds even while I

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can foretell their days and indeed their deaths to the very day. In such a mood, I saw again how the papers were age- darkened and brittle. At times, these contradictory sensations, of intimacy and distance, of suspense and of omniscience, alternated as I read, shuttling me roughly back and forth, like a lurching old amusement-park ride, in4icting emotional and temporal whiplash; at other times, these feelings overwhelmed all at once, a bombardment. But there were also long stretches in their writings about ordinary daily life being lived by three people which had a soothing, sedative e=ect as the night hours passed and drowsiness set in. It was amid such immersion in these three lives, partly pleasant, partly discom5ting, that I began to silently, urgently warn Jan about his doomed marriage plans with my mother. I watched helplessly, sadly, as Jan kept writing to her of their wedding and honeymoon (he suggests they sail around the world somehow on borrowed money — one of the childishly impractical ideas that all three cherish at various times, and which remind me how very young they are). In the late fall, however, Jan 5nally senses that something is amiss. My mother, tormented by her epistolary a=air with my father, begins to withdraw from both lovers. Her correspondence dwindles to a trickle. Jan 5rst mentions this to her with a light scolding: “Incidentally, two days without a letter from you — you bad, bad girl.” 2en: “It 5nally arrived! After six days the mailbox was again blessed with a letter. O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!” As the weeks pass, however, Jan repeatedly asks her, with baFement mounting to alarm, why she doesn’t

6:B T!" G#$% W!& N"'"$ C()" B(*+ (,- O.!"$ E//(0/ write more. He asks for her phone number in New York, a request she evades. “Holy God!” Jan 5nally cries out, “I’m just about at the end of my rope. I wish you would write or call or send me your phone number — I need you desperately.”

F$!; (,# 0&$.( ;!$'&') my father awakens in Paris, he deluges my mother with impassioned missives. I discovered his letters inadvertently, believing they were from Jan. 2ey, too, were carefully preserved by my mother in chronological order and bound by the same age-sti=ened, burgundy ribbons. 2e French airmail envelopes were lovely Schwitter-like collages — tiny, rectangular compositions of stamped dates, cursive names, numeric addresses, and rows of franked postage stamps with exquisite miniature engravings — a propeller airplane soaring up through clouds, a mountaineer balanced on an Alpine cli=, a tropical colonial town viewed through palms, or rows of bewhiskered or bejeweled eminences. 2e 4imsy airmail envelopes were strained to bursting with the papers that had been folded and refolded and forced into them. But unlike Jan’s letters, which were mostly handwritten, my father’s were usually typed. Sometimes, unfolding the papers, I thought I caught a whi= of the pungent Gauloises he had smoked while in Paris — though probably it was just Parisian dust, imported and preserved from 1956. With his “Paris Journal” open beside his letters, I accompany my nineteen-year-old father as he debarks from the freighter in Le Havre, reaches Paris, and settles with his duFebag in the Hotel Bourdeaux, a modest, old establishment in the heart of the network of snaking lanes

Your two letters came this morning. I read them both a few times. I don’t know what to say. I said once that your absence was like a pause in my mechanism. I may never express myself more accurately. It is as though some irremediable hollowness had alighted on my being. And there is nothing to do but wait for your presence to dispel it.

And my father, like Jan, speaks eagerly of marriage:

Have you decided to marry me? Wonderful! I want you as many things — as a lover, as an essence, as a wife and mother for my children. But most of all, simply as yourself, whom I love. Know only that I have never loved you less than I loved you that very 5rst night we

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made love, when I watched the dawn with the smell of your hair following me in the street.

He repeatedly asks for her photograph, which she eventually sends. In the little snapshot, which also surfaced among my father’s papers, she gazes seductively straight at the camera. On the back, she wrote, in French: “I don’t look like this much anymore — the hair’s longer. But this is for you my love — your Franchette. Oct. 1956.”) My father reveals how deeply the sudden sight of her face, when opening her letter, a=ects him:

I have never stopped thinking of us in New York. When I got your picture this morning, I stared and stared at it, and 5nally put it in my billfold. I have never carried a girl’s picture with me; I always had a little contempt for people who did; it seemed at once sentimental and ostentatious. Finally, I took the picture out of the little celluloid window and put it in under some cards — every time I opened my wallet, I saw you, and I was seized by such a terrible need for you that all I could do was put the picture out of sight. I do not want to love you that way — out of loneliness, out of clutching needs. It is sel5sh and unclean to love that way, a bad way to love or be loved.

2at week, Jan also receives her photograph — probably the same one:

Dear Francie, Your picture came this morning and I don’t quite know how to express the feelings it inspired. Your lovely, exquisite face came back to me with a powerful clarify that quite overwhelmed me. I must have looked at it for an hour. Next to yourself, it was the nicest thing I have ever been given.

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All day I have been like an epileptic having minor seizures as your face snapped into my consciousness. Where are you my love — why are you not here? I am preoccupied with you like a sixteen-year-old in love for the 5rst time. I thirst for you now as dry land for rain. And you are the music, while the music lasts. May it remain. Time passes, time passes — and yet so very slowly. Come quickly my wife, for I am desirous of thee. Jan

Such leisurely, 5nely wrought letters! Such meditations on love! It’s not surprising that my mother was tormented by the prospect of choosing between her men. I wonder if any literary romantic adolescent today, typing on a computer screen, composes such lush, ardent love letters as those that these two 1950s Romeos sent to their Juliet. And does any college girl today save them in stacks bound by red ribbons? 2ese teenagers’ letters, although not scratched with quill pens, seemed, with their unhurried pace, their quoted poems, Keatsian language, brittle paper, and old stamped envelopes, to belong under glass beside the nineteenth- century letters of the English Romantic poets, as quaint cultural relics from a simpler time. I believe these 5rst months of my parents’ courtship, 5rst in Manhattan, then through the mails, were the happiest period of their turbulent twelve-year relationship, and perhaps of my father’s life. For him, at nineteen, the stars have miraculously aligned: he has escaped Eisenhower’s America and is at last in his long-sought Paris, a healthy young man savoring his new freedom, to write poetry in cafes and wander the city as he wishes, and he is ecstatic with the 5rst 4ush of love for the girl he will marry. Even their separation is a joyous heartache. “During the day, I smile idiotically

6<: T!" G#$% W!& N"'"$ C()" B(*+ (,- O.!"$ E//(0/ for no reason except my profound love for her, and her love for me,” he says in his journal. “God, I would give ten years of my life for just one kiss from her now!” Amid his 5rst whirlwind weeks in the Latin Quarter he occasionally pauses to jot an incongruous, single sentence about her: “Got lost in daydreams of Francie again today while at lecture,” or, “Last night, dreamed again of Francie.” He thinks he glimpses her in a café before realizing it’s impossible, then a moment later thinks he sees her on the street. He listens to a radio broadcast of Grieg’s Piano Concerto in A Minor, and its romantic strains conjure my mother. “Oh well,” he says wryly, “everything reminds me of her.” 2is is true — she is everywhere for him in his lovesickness, in all he sees and hears and reads. He moons about Paris with her photograph in his wallet and cupid’s dart sticking out from his chest, Love’s latest dazed victim. He’s just opened Chaucer’s epic poem Troilus and Criseyde, and the story of young lovers torn apart by the siege of Troy prompts him to say that he “cannot pick it up without thinking of Francie,” and that he feels kinship with the Trojan prince Troilus pining for his Criseyde, a faraway captive of the Greeks. To my mother, he quotes a full stanza of the poem, in which Troilus declares to Criseyde that he lacks the power to “stryve/Ayeyns the god of Love” and asks for mercy. One day, a glance in a bookshop window leads him to engage in a comparison of my dark-haired mother with another heroine, Mérimée’s Carmen, the wild, cruel Spanish “Gypsy” who spurns and humiliates the lovelorn soldier Don José:

A picture of Carmen on the cover of a book in a shop window. Amazingly like Francie. She should have been a

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gypsy. If ever there was a role for Francie it’s Carmen. But fortunately, she is too capable of warmth, too incapable of knife-edge unthinkingness toward others ever to really be a Carmen. I have 5nally met a girl with whom I could live forgetfully, completely, con5dingly.

He buys the book and reads it at one sitting. He addresses her as “Dear Carmen” and tells her of Mérimée’s story, and he continues to address her as Carmen for several days. He marvels privately at their unity of spirit:

I have often thought that Francesca is what I would be if I were female. 2ere are certain strong di=erences between us, but our backgrounds, attitudes, temperaments, etc., are so similar that I 5nd it impossible to explain. We like the same things, hate the same things; we are even afraid of the same things. 2ere is something about her presence which modi5es the wildness and violence of my temperament.

(My mother, after meeting my father, had written in her diary that he “was so very much like me that I was beginning to wonder if I had found a missing piece of my soul.”) My young parents’ love letters are, for me, both surprising and touching, for they display a tenderness and ardor I’d never suspected while I was growing up. My father also displays an unexpected boyish humor that is often also intellectually precocious. He concludes one note by lightheartedly combining Karl Jaspers, Plato, and economic theory with a lover’s sly smile: “I end with a kiss on the Existenz, a tickle below the Platonic Ideal, and a hand slipping with insidious intentions somewhere between the Absolute and the Just Price.”

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At times, his humor can be quite elaborate, as when he satirizes academic pedantry:

I have been searching for a long time for a word which would tell you what I want to say to you. I call you “love,” I tell you that I love you, etcetera. It leaves much unsaid. I consulted Webster, Winston, Oxford, Funk & Wagnall, Schwantz & Crotchet. I 5nally found it. Snyzxb. From the Sanskrit Schrytznub through the Latin Schrybnyb to the Old English Snyzxb. 2at is, if you don’t mind being called by an archaic word. It means, “Jasmine 4ower touched by the tongue of the dawn” (cf. Webster, page 942, column 2, section 8, footnote 3, meaning c, the 5ne print). 2e only contemporary usage is in German in Heine’s poem “2e Lorelei,” in the famous passage, “Ich weiss nicht was soll es bedeuten /Das ich so snyzxb bin.” You have, then, made literature. So, love, till soon…

As time passes, however, my father, like Jan, begins to notice that my mother writes less frequently. “No letter today from Francesca” becomes a leitmotif with many variations: “Why isn’t Francie writing?” “No envelope from her waiting for me today.” “Again, no mail from Francie.” Finally, like Jan, he questions her gently about it:

It’s been over a week since I got a letter. It takes just about six or seven days to begin to wonder if my letters are reaching you or if there is something wrong. So, if a week goes by and you’re busy, or just don’t feel like writing, send a card that says “Hello, Love,” just so I know you’re alive.

2en, in late fall, my father abruptly plunges into a state

I got back to the hotel at 5ve in the evening feeling extremely lonely and depressed. No letter from Francie for more than two weeks now. Every time she goes a week or so without writing, I accumulate a little more mistrust, impatience and hostility. And I begin to feel foolish, sending my letters, speaking freely and long to someone who does not answer.

2is paragraph particularly pains me, for it marks the very 5rst fracture in their love, a wound which would never heal. My father 5lls his journal with his mounting resentment toward my mother, expressing doubts of their love:

Monday will be three weeks since I’ve heard from Francie. And at a time when I need so badly to get just one letter, one word to make me feel, in the midst of my anxiety, that there is someone to whom it matters. With Francie I degrade myself as a man and as a human being. I was 4attered and distraught when I began with her. I can’t base my life on something like that. I have been an ass, playing Don Jose to her Carmen after all.

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A few sentences on, he puts on paper his worry that she is being unfaithful: “I can’t help suspect that there may be another man. Has she gone back to Jan?” My father had cause for concern: my mother was just then swooning in the embraces of his rival.

“I C%'( +!E — '!( *+ 8,!'# !$ ;%&1 but in my arms,” Jan had declared to his elusive 5ancée. “I am tired of this separation in which we hurt each other by silence and misunderstandings — and time is passing.” 2e next weekend, my mother, in her Manhattan studio, opens the door and beholds Jan himself, standing before her:

It was cold, very cold and snowy. Jan, tall, in a trench coat and blue beret, suddenly arrived at my door and took me and kissed me. I was shocked of course. 2en we talked a little, but I felt strange. After a while, he picked up a guitar and began to sing, and I felt him touch again that je ne sais quoi which he moves in me. He came to put his arms around me. We stood and I felt the old and mellow mixture of height and roughness and scent. We kissed with the same familiar tenderness and eager giving, ending in a breathless moving desire. I cannot describe the feeling which rose to my chest when it was pressed against him, I only know that I felt alive and stirred and warm again. To be kissed by him, to feel my own hard breathing matched counterpoint against his fast hard breathing and to feel my throat kissed, my hair invaded, was to feel alive once more.

My mother’s steamy embrace with Jan was unsettling to me, to the child within, but I enjoyed the characteristic

I think you know how unnecessary and futile it would be for me to try to express my feelings concerning the past weekend. 2e change it wrought was profound. Once again, the phoenix quality of our love has exhib- ited itself; once again the word “love” has assumed an entirely new meaning. It is strange, and in a way, hard to be writing a letter to you because you seem so close and real that I am unable to accept your absence. I have not yet acquired that sense of removal necessary to set the proper words on paper. 2ere is a quality of tragedy to you that colors everything you touch, yet there is also that about you which instills ine=able and innocent joy in the most glorious sense of that word. You are a thing apart from ordinary existence, for yours is an exquisite, innocent life. If I were distilled to my essence, your hands would be marked on my soul. Who else could say anything as beautiful and throbbing as your reply to my question of why you were crying? “I have set thee as a seal upon my heart.” Tenderly, Jan

Poor, tender Jan! So blissful with new hope for their “phoenix-like” love! So enraptured by his lover’s

“innocence”! No, Jan, no, she’s playing you false! I silently shout. Her tears are not what they seem! And immediately I’m abashed for betraying my mother — and then incredulous at myself. While Jan has returned to Chicago, my father is still miserable in Paris and beseeching my mother to write:

Darling, 2e idea of you is the one thing that prevents me from being entirely alone here. Our separation was just beginning to be bearable, but now, again, day after day, no letter. 2e thought often enters my head that I don’t want to think about you at all. After all, why torture myself? But I cannot forget. I write across a bridge of three thousand miles.

And so the letters to my mother continue to arrive from Chicago and Paris: they await her together in her mailbox in the evenings, bringing the voices of her distant beaux imploring her to write, to con5rm she is well, to assure her love, to explain her silence. 2eir competing demands for her heart both paralyze her and make her desperate to 4ee:

I have been thinking for the past two days that I need to get away, to make some kind of move — but where to move? I’m wondering if it would be good for me to somehow leave the country — to go to England perhaps for a few months — to be alone for a while, to be thrust upon myself, inward. I feel so guilty about having stopped writing to them. But I also feel so completely helpless — I’ve tried to write — I don’t know how many letters I started, but anything I say sounds so

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weak, so meaningless that I 5nally gave up. 2en, Jan visited over that weekend. I didn’t know what to say to him, or now to Arno. My feelings for Jan are very strong. But so are they for Arno. Oh how I wish something would tell me what to do. I don’t feel strong enough to be able to tell myself. 2is, I know is wrong and weak. But what is wrong in being able to love two or even three di=erent people at the same time? One loves them for di=erent qualities in themselves. I am incapable of making a choice at this point. 2is situation could lead me past sanity — perhaps there is already a touch of insanity in me.

She then sketches idealized portraits of her men, emphasizing their opposites:

One is a Jew, with no light in the blackness of his hair. His eyes are burning, his lips tight and his skin against the blackness is a white shock to behold. Restless, driven, a fury of force and a core of violence burning, choate underneath. His body is powerful, his back strong, his caress unholy, and frightening as the demonic mocking in his eyes and smile. 2e other, a Gentile, with golden lights in silky hair. Blue, slow eyes enmesh me and make me catch my breath. His mouth is tender, his skin pale. Restless, but not driven. He is lithe and slim, and tall with a body that would have pleased a Grecian sculptor. 2e shaggy hair should be adorned with vines and leaves. Satyr he would be, and would have Pan for God. Child of April and of rain.

Finally, in December, overcome by anguish, she dashes o= confessions to both. She begs their forgiveness. In her diary she writes: “I pray they understand.”