American Childhood (16 page)

To collect insects I equipped myself with the usual paraphernalia: glass-headed pins, a net, and a killing jar. It was insects in jars again—but unlike the hapless teacher who put the big moth’s cocoon in the little mason jar, I knew, I thought, what I was doing. In the bottom of the killing jar—formerly a pickle jar—I laid a wad of cotton soaked in cleaning fluid containing carbon tetrachloride, which compound I thrilled myself by calling, offhandedly, “carbon tet.” A circle of old door screen prevented the insects’ tangling in the cotton. I placed each insect on the screen and quickly tightened the jar lid. Then, as if sensitively, I looked away. After a suitable interval I poured out the dead thing as carefully as I could, and pinned it and its festive, bunting-like row of fluttering labels in a cigar box. My grandfather had saved the cigar boxes, one for each order of insect; they smelled both sharp and sweet, of cedar and leaf tobacco. I pinned the insects in rows, carefully driving the pins through chitinous thoraxes just where the books indicated. Four beetles I collected were so big they had a cigar box to themselves.

Once I returned to my attic bedroom after four weeks at summer camp. There, beside the detective table, under the plaster-stain ship, was the insect collection, a stack of cigar boxes. I checked the boxes. In the big beetles’ cigar box I found a rhinoceros beetle crawling on its pin. The pin entered the beetle through that triangle in the thorax between the wing-cover tops; it emerged ventrally above and between the legs. The big black beetle’s six legs hung down waving in the air, well above the floor of the cigar box. It crawled and never got anywhere. It must have been pretty dehydrated; the attic was hot. Presumably the beetle’s legs had been
waving in the air like that in search of a footing for the past four weeks.

I hated insects; that was the fact. I never caught my stamp collection trying to crawl away.

Butterflies die with folded wings. Before they’re mounted, butterflies require an elaborate chemical treatment to relax their dead muscles, a bit more every day, so you can spread their brittle wings without shattering them. After a few grueling starts at this relaxing and spreading of dead butterflies, I avoided it. When on rare occasions I killed butterflies, I stuck them away somewhere and forgot about them.

One hot evening I settled on my bed in my summer nightgown with a novel I had looked forward to reading. I lay back, opened the book, and a dead butterfly dropped headfirst on my bare neck. I jumped up, my skin crawling, and it slid down my nightgown. Somehow it stuck to my sweaty skin; when I brushed at it—whooping aloud—it fragmented, and pieces stuck to my hands and rained down on the floor. Most of the dead butterfly, which still looked as if it were demurely praying while falling apart, with folded yellow wings in shreds and a blasted black body, fell out on my foot. I brushed broken antennae and snapped legs from my neck; I wiped a glittering yellow dust of wing scales from my belly, and they stuck to my palm.

I hated insects; that I knew. Fingering insects was touching the rim of nightmare. But you have to study something. I never considered turning away from them just because I was afraid of them.

I liked their invisibility; they did not matter, so they did not exist. People’s nervous systems edited out the sight of insects before it reached their brains; my seeing insects let me live alongside human society in a different sensory world, just as insects themselves do. That I collected specimens at the country-club pool pleased me; I did not really mind that my friends turned bilious when I showed them my prizes. I loved the sport of catching butterflies; they took bad hops, like aerial grounders. (I did not know then that the truly athletic, life-loving entomologists study dragonflies, which are fantastically difficult to catch—fast, sharp-eyed, hard to
outwit.) Cringing, I taught myself to paralyze butterflies through the net, holding them lightly at the thorax as Gene Stratton Porter had done. I brought them out of the net and let them fly away—lest they fall on me dead later.

How confidently I had overlooked all this—rocks, bugs, rain. What else was I missing?

I opened books like jars. Here between my hands, here between some book’s front and back covers, whose corners poked dents in my palm, was another map to the neighborhood I had explored all my life, and fancied I knew, a map depicting hitherto invisible landmarks. After I learned to see those, I looked around for something else. I never knew where my next revelation was coming from, but I knew it was coming—some hairpin curve, some stray bit of romance or information that would turn my life around in a twinkling.

I
INTENDED TO LIVE
the way the microbe hunters lived. I wanted to work. Hard work on an enormous scale was the microbe hunters’ stock-in-trade. They took a few clear, time-consuming steps and solved everything. In those early days of germ theory, large disease-causing organisms, whose cycles traced straightforward patterns, yielded and fell to simple procedures. I would know just what to do. I would seize on the most casual remarks of untutored milkmaids. When an untutored milkmaid remarked to me casually, “Oh, everyone knows you won’t get the smallpox if you’ve had the cowpox,” I would perk right up.

Microbe Hunters
sent me to a biography of Louis Pasteur. Pasteur’s was the most enviable life I had yet encountered. It was his privilege to do things until they were done. He established the germ theory of disease; he demonstrated convincingly that yeasts ferment beer; he discovered how to preserve wine; he isolated the bacillus in a disease of silkworms; he demonstrated the etiology of anthrax and produced a vaccine for it; he halted an epidemic of cholera in fowls and inoculated a boy for hydrophobia. Toward the end of his life, in a rare idle moment, he chanced to read some of his early published papers and exclaimed (someone overheard), “How beautiful! And to think that I did it all!” The tone of this exclamation was, it seemed to me, astonished and modest, for he had genuinely forgotten, moving on.

Pasteur had not used up all the good work. Mother told me again and again about one of her heroes, a doctor working for a federal agency who solved a problem that
arose in the late forties. Premature babies, and only premature babies, were turning up blind, in enormous numbers. Why? What do premature babies have in common?

“Look in the incubators!” Mother would holler, and knock the side of her head with the heel of her hand, holler outraged, glaring far behind my head as she was telling me this story, holler, “Look in the incubators!” as if at her wit’s end facing a roomful of doctors who wrung their useless hands and accepted this blindness as one of life’s tough facts. Mother’s hero, like all of Mother’s heroes, accepted nothing. She rolled up her sleeves, looked in the incubators, and decided to see what happened if she reduced the oxygen in the incubator air. That worked. Too much oxygen had been blinding them. Now the babies thrived; they got enough oxygen, and they weren’t blinded. Hospitals all over the world changed the air mixture for incubators, and prematurity no longer carried a special risk of blindness.

Mother liked this story, and told it to us fairly often. Once she posed it as a challenge to Amy. We were all in the living room, waiting for dinner. “What would you do if you noticed that all over the United States, premature babies were blind?” Without even looking up from her homework, Amy said, “Look in the incubators. Maybe there’s something wrong in the incubators.” Mother started to whoop for joy before she realized she’d been had.

Problems still yielded to effort. Only a few years ago, to the wide-eyed attention of the world, we had seen the epidemic of poliomyelitis crushed in a twinkling, right here in Pittsburgh.

We had all been caught up in the polio epidemic: the early neighbor boy who wore one tall shoe, to which his despairing father added another two soles every year; the girl in the iron lung reading her schoolbook in an elaborate series of mirrors while a volunteer waited to turn the page; my friend who limped, my friend who rolled everywhere in a wheelchair, my friend whose arm hung down, Mother’s friend who walked with crutches. My beloved dressed-up aunt, Mother’s sister, had come to visit one day and, while
she was saying hello, flung herself on the couch in tears; her son had it. Just a touch, they said, but who could believe it?

When Amy and I had asked, Why do we have to go to bed so early? Why do we have to wash our hands again? we knew Mother would kneel to look us in the eyes and answer in a low, urgent voice, So you do not get polio. We heard polio discussed once or twice a day for several years.

And we had all been caught up in its prevention, in the wild ferment of the early days of the Salk vaccine, the vaccine about which Pittsburgh talked so much, and so joyously, you could probably have heard the crowd noise on the moon.

In 1953, Jonas Salk’s Virus Research Laboratory at the University of Pittsburgh had produced a controversial vaccine for polio. The small stories in the Pittsburgh
Press
and the
Post-Gazette
were coming out in
Life
and
Time
. It was too quick, said medical colleagues nationwide: Salk had gone public without first publishing everything in the journals. He rushed out a killed-virus serum without waiting for a safe live-virus one, which would probably be better. Doctors walked out of professional meetings; some quit the foundation that funded the testing. Salk was after personal glory, they said. Salk was after money, they said. Salk was after big prizes.

Salk tested the serum on five thousand Pittsburgh schoolchildren, of whom I was three, because I kept changing elementary schools. Our parents, like ninety-five percent of all Pittsburgh parents, signed the consent forms. Did the other mothers then bend over the desk in relief and sob? I don’t know. But I don’t suppose any of them gave much of a damn what Salk had been after.

When Pasteur died, near a place wonderfully called Saint-Cloud, he murmured to the devoted assistants who surrounded his bed, “
Il faut travailler
.”

Il faut
indeed
travailler
—no one who grew up in Pittsburgh could doubt it. And no one who grew up in Pittsburgh could doubt that the great work was ongoing. We breathed in optimism—not coal dust—with every breath. What couldn’t be done with good hard
travail?

The air in Pittsburgh had been dirty; now we could see it was clean. An enormous, pioneering urban renewal was under way; the newspapers pictured fantastic plans, airy artists’ watercolors, which we soon saw laid out and built up in steel and glass downtown. The Republican Richard King Mellon had approached Pittsburgh’s Democratic, Catholic mayor, David L. Lawrence, and together with a dozen business leaders they were razing the old grim city and building a sparkling new one; they were washing the very air. The Russians had shot Sputnik into outer space. In Shippingport, just a few miles down the Ohio River, people were building a generating plant that used atomic energy—an idea that seemed completely dreamy, but there it was. A physicist from Bell Laboratories spoke to us at school about lasers; he was about as wrought up a man as I had ever seen. You could not reasonably believe a word he said, but you could see that he believed it.

We knew that “Doctor Salk” had spent many years and many dollars to produce the vaccine. He commonly worked sixteen-hour days, six days a week. Of course. In other laboratories around the world, other researchers were working just as hard, as hard as Salk and Pasteur. Hard work bore fruit. This is what we learned growing up in Pittsburgh, growing up in the United States.

Salk had isolated seventy-four strains of polio virus. It took him three years to verify the proposition that a workable vaccine would need samples of only three of these strains. He grew the virus in tissues cultured from monkey kidneys. The best broth for growing the monkey tissue proved to be Medium Number 199; it contained sixty-two ingredients in careful proportion.

This was life itself: the big task. Nothing exhilarated me more than the idea of a life dedicated to a monumental worthwhile task. Doctor Salk never watched it rain and wished he had never been born. How many shovelfuls of dirt did men move to dig the Panama Canal? Two hundred and forty million cubic yards. It took ten years and twenty-one thousand lives and $336,650,000, but it was possible.

I thought a great deal about the Panama Canal, and
always contemplated the same notion: You could take more time, and do it with teaspoons. I saw myself and a few Indian and Caribbean co-workers wielding teaspoons from our kitchen: Towle, Rambling Rose. And our grandchildren, and their grandchildren. Digging the canal across the isthmus at Panama would tear through a good many silver spoons. But it could be done, in theory and therefore in fact. It was like Mount Rushmore, or Grand Coulee Dam. You hacked away at the landscape and made something, or you did not do anything, and just died.

How many filaments had Thomas Edison tried, over how many years, before he found one workable for incandescence? How many days and nights over how many years had Marie Curie labored in a freezing shed to isolate radium? I read a biography of George Washington Carver: so many years on the soybean, the peanut, the sweet potato, the waste from ginning cotton. I read biographies of Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Edison, Daniel Boone.

It was all the same story. You have a great idea and spend grinding years at dull tasks, still charged by your vision. All the people about whom biographies were not written were people who failed to find something that took years to do. People could count the grains of sand. In my own life, as a sideline, and for starters, I would learn all the world’s languages.

What if people said it could not be done? So much the better. We grew up with the myth of the French Impressionist painters, and its queer implication that rejection and ridicule guaranteed, or at any rate signaled, a project’s worth. When little George Westinghouse at last figured out how to make air brakes, Cornelius Vanderbilt of the New York Central Railroad said to him, “Do you mean to tell me with a straight face that a moving train can be stopped with wind?” “They laughed at Orville,” Mother used to say when someone tried to talk her out of a wild scheme, “and they laughed at Wilbur.”

I had small experience of the evil hopelessness, pain, starvation, and terror that the world spread about; I had barely
seen people’s malice and greed. I believed that in civilized countries, torture had ended with the Enlightenment. Of nations’ cruel options I knew nothing. My optimism was endless; it grew sky-high within the narrow bounds of my isolationism. Because I was all untried courage, I could not allow that the loss of courage was a real factor to be reckoned in. I put my faith in willpower, that weak notion by which children seek to replace the loving devotion that comes from intimate and dedicated knowledge. I believed that I could resist aging by willpower.

I believed then, too, that I would never harm anyone. I usually believed I would never meet a problem I could not solve. I would overcome any weakness, any despair, any fear. Hadn’t I overcome my fear of the ghosty oblong that coursed round my room, simply by thinking it through? Everything was simple. You found good work, learned all about it, and did it.

Questions of how to act were also transparent to reason. Right and wrong were easy to discern: I was right, and Amy was wrong. Many of my classmates stole things, but I did not. Sometimes, in a very tight spot, when at last I noticed I had a moral question on my hands, I asked myself, What would Christ have done? I had picked up this method (very much on the sly—we were not supposed really to believe these things) from Presbyterian Sunday school, from summer camp, or from any of the innumerable righteous orange-bound biographies I read. I had not known it to fail in the two times I had applied it.

As for loss, as for parting, as for bidding farewell, so long, thanks, to love or a land or a time—what did I know of parting, of grieving, mourning, loss? Well, I knew one thing; I had known it all along. I knew it was the kicker. I knew life pulled you in two; you never healed. Mother’s emotions ran high, and she suffered sometimes from a web of terrors, because, she said, her father died when she was seven; she still missed him.

My parents played the Cole Porter song “It’s All Right with Me.” When Ella Fitzgerald sang, “There’s someone I’m trying so hard to forget—don’t you want to forget someone
too?,” these facile, breathy lyrics struck me as an unexpectedly true expression of how it felt to be alive. This was experience at its most private and inarticulate: longing and loss. “It’s the wrong time, it’s the wrong place, though your face is charming, it’s the wrong face.” I was a thirteen-year-old child; I had no one to miss, had lost no one. Yet I suspect most children feel this way, probably all children feel this way, as adults do; they mourn this absence or loss of someone, and sense that unnamable loss as a hole or hollow moving beside them in the air.

Loss came around with the seasons, blew into the house when you opened the windows, piled up in the bottom desk and dresser drawers, accumulated in the back of closets, heaped in the basement starting by the furnace, and came creeping up the basement stairs. Loss grew as you did, without your consent; your losses mounted beside you like earthworm castings. No willpower could prevent someone’s dying. And no willpower could restore someone dead, breathe life into that frame and set it going again in the room with you to meet your eyes. That was the fact of it. The strongest men and women who had ever lived had presumably tried to resist their own deaths, and now they were dead. It was on this fact that all the stirring biographies coincided, concurred, and culminated.

Time itself bent you and cracked you on its wheel. We were getting ready to move again. I knew I could not forever keep riding my bike backward into ever-older neighborhoods to look the ever-older houses in the face. I tried to memorize the layout of this Richland Lane house, but I couldn’t force it into my mind while it was still in my bones.

I saw already that I could not in good faith renew the increasingly desperate series of vows by which I had always tried to direct my life. I had vowed to love Walter Milligan forever; now I could recall neither his face nor my feeling, but only this quondam urgent vow. I had vowed to keep exploring Pittsburgh by bicycle no matter how old I got, and planned an especially sweeping tour for my hundredth birthday in 2045. I had vowed to keep hating Amy in order to defy Mother, who kept prophesying I would someday not
hate Amy. In short, I always vowed, one way or another, not to change. Not me. I needed the fierceness of vowing because I could scarcely help but notice, visiting the hatchling robins at school every day, that it was mighty unlikely.