Shoplifting at Dracula's, cont'd.
I retrospectively detect the first
squirming of eroticism in Ancient Greece. I read D’Aulaire’s Book of Greek Myths at age ten or so. I couldn’t get
enough of my fantasy Hellas, and Eros was one of the gods lurking in those Arcadian
glades. The pictures of flimsily-clad Aphrodite lit a surly flame. I had a
crush on Athena, too, and half-nude naiads and nymphs flitted in and out of my
banal fantasy world, giving me ideas (mostly the wrong ones, but still). I read
Edith Hamilton and Robert Graves, and fancied myself—pigeon-chested,
bespectacled, increasingly bepimpled—a godling or faun sprinting through the
groves, muscular Apollo in pursuit of fair Daphne for reasons then not entirely
clear.
But I found escape from the drab
schoolgoing everyday world elsewhere, too. Beyond my sylvan Attica tolled the
icy (and unerotic) North: Selma Lagerlof’s The
Adventures of Nils; Hans Christian Andersen’s quirky and sinister tales;
the Grimms’ grimmer ones; the Nordic legends in an edition hauntingly
illustrated with winged storm gods, gangling trolls with pebbles for eyes, and
hooved revenants thundering across snow-shrouded rooftops. When I found myself
in Iceland two decades later I was on the qui vive for all that, but my
alertness was dulled by the local aquavit, so I saw no trolls, although I did
meet a drunken doctor with the heroic Viking name of Magnus Magnusson (see
below, but not yet).
All this reading and cartoon-drawing
happened away from school, of course. Home was where real life grew and
bloomed. For the first year or so, after the Hotel Beau-Rivage, home was an
anodyne apartment building in the Servette district, a modern quarter of such
anodyne apartment buildings and lower middle-class emporia: laundries, service
stations, small groceries, workers’ cafés. Our apartment’s furnishings were
modern in a 1950s style—it was, after all, the 1950s—and had a voguish
Scandinavian look: blonde woods, ergonomic armchairs, sleek radio sets with
green lights and polished knobs, tall spindly lamps, frosted-glass doors; low
lozenge-shaped coffee tables, too, and a hideous sub-Jackson Pollock canvas on
the living-room wall that for some reason I associate with inedible fish
dinners.
But my most vivid memory of the apartment is of
the red-and-white shape I glimpsed through the living room’s frosted-glass
doors late one Christmas Eve, reinforcing my wavering belief in Santa.
* * * *
At the time the Santa I’d seen through the
door was managing to stay employed, and he made enough thereby to spread around
a bit of largesse, although his business trips were becoming longer and more
frequent and were—I can see clearly now—a welcome escape from the dues paid to
his marriage, which was in the process of falling apart, or already had. The
diametrically opposed personalities of my educated, sober Mum and
unintellectual, hard-drinking Dad were drifting apart into separate fogbanks,
never to emerge. The result for me was a childhood spent in a family where
nothing was said about what really matters, a reticence that I still suffer
from, and one from which I emerge, unfairly to my own family, mainly in my
writing.
Dad had no such outlet, but, like many in his
predicament, he threw himself into his work. His was certainly no office job;
as far as I can remember he never had an office, never sat at a desk. His work,
installing and wiring electronic carillons, was an escape into a kind of
medieval journeyman’s world. Hands-on involvement in the electronic-carillon
business meant climbing up steep church towers in midwinter and midsummer alike
and rigging up the bells with frozen or sweating hands, and this is what Dad
did, all over Europe, from Hammerfest to Salonika. It was certainly not the
kind of conventional occupation one’s Dad was supposed to have—“he works for
the U.N.”; “he works for Caterpillar”; “he’s a salesman for Chrysler”—but it
got Dad out of the house and to all four corners of the Continent, and in ’62,
after hooking up a set of electronic bells in the Vatican, he met Pope John
XXIII himself. I still have the official photograph: the Pope in his white
robes, amiably bemused and looking a touch impatient; Dad’s boss, at ease in
tails; Dad, ill at ease in tails and in the exalted company and looking
desperate for a drink. (In Rome he’d get one in the company of dashing Padre
Paolo Barbieri, an Italian priest and the chief technician at Radio Vaticano,
who drove a red Lancia convertible and with whom Dad struck up a fast
friendship.)
But, apart from marriage strains (of
which at the time I had no inkling), in ’59 enough money was coming in from
those electronic bells to permit us to move into a new home, an “English” house
in the suburbs. What made the house English was not so much the fact that an “artistic”
Englishwoman had lived there with another Englishwoman, equally “artistic,” as
its English-style garden, with gooseberry bushes, strawberries, raspberries, a
couple of cherry trees, an apple tree producing wizened crab apples, and gravel
walkways that meandered about and doubled back on themselves, like the ground
plan of a maze that was never built. It was a laboratory for kiddie introverts.
Bruno Bettelheim, who mandated that children must have magic in their lives or
they’d turn nasty later on, would have approved: My garden was a magical Eden
where I retreated from the world into the tall grass at a fork in the garden
path to read Tintin, or Nordic legends, or D’Aulaire’s
Greek Myths, and dream of cars and airplanes and of make-believe places
like Norway and Greece and Nepal.
Overlooking me during those dreamy moments, at the top
of a short, steep slope that was perfect for a short, sweet sled ride in a
snowy winter, beneath a precipitous roof designed so that snow would slide off
in such winters, was the house itself, of gray stucco, with two storeys and a
balcony. An apricot bush swarmed up the side and in the spring yielded soft,
pulpy, sweet fruit. (The bush was sturdy enough for me to use as a ladder to
the living room window. I did this with annoying frequency until Mum had the
bush trimmed back.) Upstairs, beneath the eaves, were: My parents’ room; my
bedroom/sanctum; a long, low-ceilinged, well-lit bathroom, containing a clawfoot
bathtub in which I soaked for many a long dreamy hour; and a narrow attic with
skylights that opened out onto the roof.
Downstairs was the living room, containing a
soot-blackened fireplace and a well-stocked bookcase (all Mum’s books, heavy on
Waugh, Galsworthy, F. Scott Fitzgerald, very light on the French, except Simone
de Beauvoir and Camus). The living room was furnished in—to put it politely—a
shabby-genteel style that grew shabbier and less genteel as the years went by:
a wing chair, for example, that stayed in the family long after its inner
stuffing started dribbling out through a rip in the side; and a sofa with
collapsed springs that sagged like a hammock when sat upon. Through French
doors from the living room one entered the dining room furnished in the same
lackadaisical style, including a scuffed-up dining table at which, when we were
a family, we ate together, watched by our Siamese cat, Pete Toy, from the
windowsill. Mum, who was a good cook of heavy-sauce-and-cream dishes typical of
the American ‘40s, made our meals on a stove of similar vintage in the
antiquated and dimly-lit kitchen, a cozy place. The small, cold, mysteriously
flushing toilet next door was not, and it acquired a special place in my
nightmares…speaking of which, the door next to the spectral toilet opened onto
a steep staircase that spiraled downward into an unused cellar strongly
redolent of the olfactory ghosts of long-dead apples grown by the artistic
Englishwoman, and possibly inhabited on and off by her ghost or others,’ too,
as Mum learned years later. I was away somewhere, selfishly enjoying the fruits
of her hard and thankless labors as a U.N. secretary, and Dad was back in the
States. She was lying alone in her bedroom late one night with only Pete for
company when she heard heavy, deliberate footsteps ascending the cellar stairs.
“I lay there trying to remember if I’d locked
the inside door,” she told me. “Whoever it was tried the door three times, and
then I heard nothing. Nothing at all. No footsteps or anything. Next day I
discovered that the door in the cellar was locked, too, so no one could have
got in. So who or what was it?”
And Mum was never drunk in her life. The
phantom of the “artistic” Englishwoman, hoping to use the spooky loo—or console
a lonely lady?
