C
HILDREN
, gathered on my lawn or on nearby lawns, waiting for me to play, saw me through windows, crying, being carried to bed, covered with vomit. I stank of fear, really. The memories I have of that return (and of the months that followed) are black, scorched. I yelled at Leila, “
DO YOU KNOW I DON’T LIKE THIS? DON’T YOU CARE?
”
Momma said, “Leave me alone—I can’t face this. Go talk to your father.”
I ran to S.L., a tear-splattered, beslobbered, vandalized child; and I yelled, “
DADDY, BE NICE! HELP ME, DADDY!
”
And he said, “Don’t be a whiner—I can’t stand a whiner—” He was embarrassed: he would not look at me: what had he expected to happen?
He said, “Don’t act like this—don’t be a snob—I can’t stand snobs.…” He said it over and over.
M
OMMA
, as I said earlier, often spoke of her looks as being in defiance of a world of what people did to her—in return, you had advantages—but meanwhile you had to bear up under storms and against storms: she used to say, “
I haven’t lost my nerve.”
Well, I lost mine.
A childish cure. I will be fat, and then only true lovers will fight over me. I will be ugly. I will be silent.
I stopped playing with other children—how could I
play?
One is worried: one wants to be an ugly child—unlooked at. I wanted to spare the other children. I wanted no more jealousy. I wanted only one family. One becomes afraid to sleep: dreams are not tactful.
In my case, childish hate became a matter of dying—I did not like having to die. I think my old self died—largely so, anyway.
So—to be melodramatic myself—the Cohns watched the destruction of the personality they had helped give me. They took it back, in a sense. The child presented himself as dull, unwilling to leave the house—that sort of thing—and very ugly, and then he said, “You’re my parents—why don’t you love me?”
Often I played at being very stupid—I loved and hated them in
this way
—by being ugly and much, much, much smarter than they were. I would suddenly show them how smart I was; and then I would be silent and wait to see if they regretted anything, if they had learned to love me yet in this new guise.
I would say, “I only want one father and one mother,” but they refused to understand. Sometimes they turned on me and threatened to put me in the Orphans’ Home—and one time they did. Sometimes I was scared of them and then I think I intended to make myself a pure Cohn, to placate them that way. And since Leila was not very steady, and S.L. was S.L.… I became … very strange. Perhaps I did get to be like them.
To carry out my imitation, I did not take my eyes or senses off the Cohns for a minute.
I was, in a way, as surprised as everybody else that I became so strange, but I did not stop being important to the families: my fate weighed on everyone, including me: this gave me some satisfaction.
I wouldn’t talk in school, to anyone—except occasionally I would answer questions from the teacher that she asked another child, one who was too embarrassed to answer or not able to answer. I took care of my class intellectually; they were my parish.
Psychiatric treatment was offered. Two psychiatrists: one I simply disliked and would not talk to at all; the other did not believe me. He probably would have in time, but he did not say what I wanted to hear: “The Cohns are your real parents; that is your real home.” So I snubbed him. I was too bright, too sensible when I chose to be, for my opinions to be ignored, even though I was a child. The psychiatrist pompously retreated.
Meanwhile Momma—Leila—who was increasingly selfish about money and strange in her own life—was more and more polite, openly affectionate toward me as toward a visitor, toward someone who wasn’t so lucky after all, who was maybe worse off than she, Momma, was, than she, Momma, was as she aged. She made it quite clear, though, that she disliked my suffering—it was my stubbornness she admired, the victories I won in being ill (I made
everyone
leave me alone). The worst of this partial return to life was that I had an ineradicable sense of cowardice—the Cohns had made me afraid. I began to talk, however—this was after about six months of silence and fatness—to neighbors: only grownups. I was very polite, uncertain, then suddenly loud—but they liked me anyway. Meanwhile everything S.L. said to me struck me as unendurably stupid and not worth listening to: I’d listen to him with a look of disgust. He seemed weary—he disgusted himself. He left Momma three times that winter.
Defiantly, I went back to being smart in school. I read the textbooks the first day of classes, and that was that. If a child asked me to explain something, I would. When a teacher addressed me, I might or might not be rude and show contempt for her vocabulary, evasions, or the dizzy fuzz of her explanations. Teachers said I was “a terror”—even so, some were fond of me, and no one among the children I knew or had known ever turned on me or did more than mention with surprise, expecting an explanation of, my new ugliness. Perhaps they needed me because I explained school subjects to them. Maybe they were an un-cruel bunch of children.
Maybe I was unusually tough—or lucky—or a horror. But I never did have to suffer in some ways as much as some kids did. Any number of kids in my class were unhappier and more helpless than I was, except
at moments, at the worst moments. Then I felt I was a mongrel, a dog—a mangy one.
Sometimes the parents of the kids in the class would defend me—they’d go to school and remonstrate with a teacher or with S.L. and Leila about me, although I hadn’t asked them to, and hadn’t complained; sometimes their concern was that I ought to be placed in a higher grade because they thought their children were being overshadowed and I was being
“wasted”
but they were also very often kind for no other reason except kindness. Sometimes they liked something I said, or my tense ugliness, or something I did, some quirk of behavior, violent or nonviolent, in me. They’d shake their heads over my parents—I brought a good deal of dislike on Leila and S.L. from others, and enmity from people who worried about me. Leila said, “Let them adopt you—let’s see how long they can stand it.”
Mostly, at school, I sat quietly in my seat and stared out the window.
The worst time felt black and poisonous. I woke up each morning as if I was rising to my knees in a black, tarry, poisonous pit. I dressed myself sloppily, crazily. Momma made me re-dress myself often. One Saturday, Momma said, “Get some fresh air. You can’t sit around inside all day—I get enough blame as it is.”
Dully, I sat on the front steps, but when other kids appeared I went and vanished, so to speak, down a driveway, across a backyard—alone, demented, wretched. I observed very little—some sheets being aired on grass, some pretty-colored brick in sunlight. It was hard to walk: I dragged along, all coordination gone.
In a park, a large park, nearly empty—because it was reputed to be dangerous—amid the trees and sunlight, there came to me a sense that I was alone. Bedded in my stale agony in that tree-y emptiness, in the slowness of time there, I did not scream when three black boys suddenly jumped on me from behind some bushes; and in my deadness I did little more than stare at them when they started to beat me. But my staring stopped them; they ran away; they hadn’t hurt me. I walked on, heavily, gasping for breath, asthmatic—with as yet unfaded terror. Then I saw a wad of violets, in bloom, at the foot of a tall tree that had a plaque on it that said “Red Oak”—some such thing.
I think I had come to believe, as some natural clock ticked away several months of gradually stabilizing agony, that there was to be no rescue for me ever.
I was, I think, actually crazed with fear; anyway, fearful: and yet I
was calm about it. The wind blew and moved my hair; that startled me; everything was swollen with elements of the incomprehensible-to-me left over from the events in the Cohns’ house.
When I saw the violets, what I felt, first, was hopelessness: then interest of a tired kind. I knelt—and looked: for a while, my senses wouldn’t register with any orderliness what I saw; I had to
touch
the flowers to see them: my sensual deadness was familiar—and even reassuring—like a pillow gone flat and a little smelly: there was a balance—one hovered at nothingness. Then perhaps the memory of an old embrace or pleasure, or a current boredom with insanity, tilted the balance; I touched the flower: slowly its purpleness grew clear to me. After a long time, I smelled the odor of the violets. I began to shake quite a bit. I lay down and put my cheek on the violets as on a pillow. Or as on a mother. I put my lips on them—to taste, not kiss. I brushed them with my open eyes, then slowly—it was more pleasant—with my eyelids. I felt coolness in the ground under me, coolness on my fat stomach. Haltingly, with blurs, I became aware of the hues and shapes of the petals of the violets until they filled my eyes and mind and of the odor until it filled my nose and lungs—until a sense of them filled
me.
It seemed to take forever, to involve an interminable mathematics, this restoration of order to the senses and the mind. Bone and muscle attempted to pull themselves together to support this mental suppleness. It seems too elaborate to say it like this, but what happened felt to me as if the unhappiness had been
willed,
and therefore I could fight it if I chose: I could do it; almost easily, but gracelessly, I lay and looked at the violets for a long time and saw them clearly as I willed. I see them still, the defenselessness, the unparentedness of them.
“Go on,” I said to myself, “if flowers can do it, and they don’t last very long—people are really terrible to them—you can do it, go ahead, live, just live, go ahead, live.”
It was a secret, a boy’s secret. No one knows how to take care of you—you’re a monster—but go ahead and live anyway.
It’s all right to be a monster.
A child adopts childish reasons: childish reasons have to serve in one’s childhood—that’s what childhood is.
O
F COURSE
, I had changed. And, oddly, I knew it—I did not expect other children to be like me.
I found I still had a position in the school. When an anti-Semitic teacher attacked me as having undue influence on the other children, they still stuck by me—after all, the anti-Semitic teacher was powerful in their lives only for a year but I’d be with them through high school to help with homework; and even for the present year they couldn’t understand her unless I translated what she said to them. Also, no matter how unlikely it sounds, they
liked
me, and they weren’t
sure
they liked her unless I said she was terrific.
In school, I did not speak and was not addressed—it was too hard for the teachers to deal with me. Sometimes they gave me special work; they could not grade it, however; they would get flustered. When I read the textbooks the first day of school, I did not consciously remember what I read but when something was mentioned I would see, usually, the page in the textbook where that thing had been discussed, all the words on that page—and even the clouds or rain or sun outside the window that I had glanced at when I looked up from reading—and I could explain the textbook and point out where it differed from what the teacher said—things like that—and when it was most advisable to follow the textbook and when it was better to listen to the teacher: I told my classmates things like that.
I worried some about speech, about saying things that would be applicable, that would be worth someone’s trying to understand what you were saying.
If I did speak in class, the other kids, as if electrified by a current, attached themselves to what I said. The teachers were good, often, but they spoke a school language, a dreary mandarin American that only kids who were the sons or daughters of teachers spoke. I spoke various middle-class Americans, and recess American (shouts, hurried explanations), and local, street, or dirty American; and in play I spoke literary
English.
I taught the kids after school on a street corner; I was a child, and often—not always—knew why they didn’t understand whatever it was that frightened them in the lesson. I knew their lives—to some extent. I was them-plus-me; and they were me-and-them plus and minus things. When I went to another school—when we moved a few years later—it didn’t happen like this. I mean this was just that one school where I’d been since kindergarten. They knew me and were used to me.
Because they were sometimes blamed for the way I was being brought up and because the kindness of people to me made them uneasy, both Nonie and Momma got to a point of hysteria, of giddy defiance, especially
about my not learning anything fancy or getting ahead of myself: those are their terms. They were in a funny position. They were victors in a way—Daddy was having a nervous breakdown and was afraid of them, and I clung to the house, I spurned outside kindness, I was afraid of them—and yet they were sinking, the ground under their feet dipped lower and lower every month: they were victors-going-under. It must have seemed crazily unfair, eerie, to them.
After school, after I gave the necessary lesson, kids would beckon me or invite me to play, but I wouldn’t play with them. I hurried home, I lumbered home, a monstrous child, a dog.
Often, quite often, I had bouts of murderous rage toward my parents by adoption; I felt it inwardly, only inwardly: a scalding thing—grief and hatred.
I was trying to love the Cohns, so far as I knew; but it was interesting that the more dependence I showed toward them, the more blame they received for my condition; the women Momma courted blamed her. With the greatest and dullest politeness, with a squat, ugly child’s toad-like loyalty, I yet managed to accuse her nearly every minute of an enormous failure toward me. I managed, while being “a good son,” to make her failures patently visible.
Possibly revenge
is
curative. Or time. I don’t think I was much more miserable than other children: I think in a way I enjoyed my childhood.
W
HOEVER
I played with, I was careful of him, of his pretenses. Anyone I liked or spent time with became, in a way, educated, became the second-smartest person in class and was quickly elected to things and was more important to the other kids than he had been before he was my friend.