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.

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     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?