The balloon drew sighs and a big smile from my father, who stood arms akimbo, staring up at its great silvery magnificence.
He loved invention and technology, especially anything electrical, and our house would have been one of the first with a telephone had my mother not pointed out that, besides its being extraordinarily expensive, there would only be three thousand other people in the country to call, and that all of them, family histories unknown, could call us. He was forbidden to indulge his technological urges, but I remember one night years after Woodward’s Gardens when—driven by either his love for my mother or his love of the new—he presented her with an electrical jewel fitted into a scarf pin. He inserted the tiny battery and clipped it to her lapel, where it shone with an eerie beauty. She smiled while Father explained its principles, telling us it was the newest fashion. Then Mother turned to him with a look of pity and said, “Asgar, thank you, but I can’t,” informing him that, as with French dresses, one always lets others try the newest fashion.
That was the last of Father’s transgressions, but not the first. By the time of my outing he had already been relegated to concealing his beloved wonders—such as the clear, pointed filament bulbs I discovered hidden in his study’s hollow globe one day, resting on a bed of cotton like the newly deposited eggs of a glass lizard—or resigning himself to public marvels like the one before us.
“Look at that, old man,” my father said to me in his odd accent. “Look at that!”
High above the grounds, above the wooden corral of onlookers, dwarfing even the great striped Arabian tent of the aviary beside it, rose the shimmering quilted silver of Professor Martin’s balloon. Enormous and swaying silently in the breeze, as a barker announced its wonders to the crowds below and the professor prepared for his ascension, the balloon seemed to exist in some opposite dimension, hanging from the earth in a huge reversed raindrop that trembled towards the sky.
“Man alive!” I heard beside me in a chirping voice. This wasn’t
something my parents would have said; it was a phrase I’d only heard from Nurse. “Man alive, what is it?”
That was exactly what I was asking myself. In all the excitement of the gardens, I had not paid any attention to the crowds. And there, standing beside me, was the most extraordinary exhibit of them all: an ordinary boy.
I knew I was different. Father had sat me down in his dark parlor and explained, through the forest of his cigar smoke, that my doctor’s frequent visits were unusual, but it was only because I was, as he put it, “somewhat enchanted.” Mother, whose terms of endearment included “old man” and “little bear,” explained one morning as she applied her magnolia balm that I was unlike anyone else in the world, not like any boy, or even my father as a boy, not like the servants or the cook or anyone. But all children are told these things; we are great, we are special, we are rare. I only knew I was truly different because servants whisper too much and once, as I lay hidden in the root cellar, crammed against the boards, eavesdropping, I heard Maggie telling Nurse how sorry she felt for me that I was born “so sweet but so wrong.”
But here, squinting amiably through the dust, was the thing I was not. It was a little copper-headed boy dressed, as was the fashion, like a little man in a tiny-brimmed black soft hat and suit which must have come off during the day because it was done up all wrong, like a crooked smile, with burrs and woolly fluff caught in the nap of the velvet. He glared with fresh blue eyes and wrinkled his strawberry nose, a souvenir of yesterday’s too-tempting sun. What he thought of me I cannot say. But I thought him the strangest thing I had ever seen. I knew that other little boys looked like this—I saw them from my window every day, sitting primly on a bench or hooting scandalously to a friend—but I had never learned, close up, how deformed they were. While I was solid bone and made floorboards creak and hammocks sway, this boy seemed
like a bird, or a bag of twigs, his limbs bending impossibly like those Oriental boxes that fold and unfold endlessly upon their cleverly ribboned hinges. I was stunned and mute.
Impatient, he asked again, “What is it?” because he wanted to know and here I was, an adult.
I stammered for a moment. My parents had begun to argue in whispers—I learned later that it was about whether it would be too much for Father to buy me something so exotic as a banana wrapped in foil—and so weren’t paying attention to my predicament. I had mixed so easily with the other children that day only because my self-consciousness had evaporated in the joy of discovery, but here, in this pause as the professor fiddled with his ropes and his flames, I could feel it beading up again inside my cooled heart.
“I …I don’t know.”
“You do,” he insisted, then squinted and looked at me more carefully. “Are you a midget?”
“What’s that?”
“I saw one in a museum once and he got married to a lady midget, and there was, there was the tallest man in the world who married them.”
This meaningless information passed through me like a gamma ray. Upset and confused on my first outing, I forgot the commands my parents had given me, and for the first of three times in my life, I broke the Rule. I told him the truth:
“I’m a boy.”
“You’re not. You’re a midget. You’re from Europe.” Apparently, that’s where he thought midgets were from.
“I’m a boy.”
He smiled broadly, showing a gap in his white teeth. “You’re teasing.”
“I’m not. I’m six.”
He held up both hands and made that number. “I’m six!” he
announced, and suddenly the idea of this, the newness of himself, overshadowed any further curiosity about me. “I can count to a hundred because my dad’s a tutor and he taught me.”
“I can count to fifty.” This was the amount Grandmother found decent for my age.
Hughie considered this and seemed to find it adequate. He looked up at the people wandering around us in their thick black clothes. He seemed to be watching them intently; later, I was to learn he considered himself to have magical powers and could, if asked politely, cause the trees to sway just so across a field. Then he looked at me with the face of a man who has made a decision.
“I eat paper.”
“You do?”
He nodded, growing in pride. “I eat it all the time.”
I won’t bore you with the rest of the conversation. Like the tribesmen you hear of in the Southeast seas who, upon meeting a stranger, go through long and ritualized recitations of their ancestors, we enacted the childhood ceremonies in which two boys agree they will be friends and not enemies. Just like the tribesmen, in fact, we ended it with a spitting contest that, since I won, put me in a place of love in Hughie’s mind that would endure, despite any intervening unkindnesses, all the fifty-odd years of our friendship.
“It’s time!” the barker shouted from his spiral tower.
And the miracle occurred.
Professor Martin threw his weights onto the sand below and the balloon, quivering, began to rise into the air. The little man, hoisted on his quicksilver moon, kept feeding the roaring fire at its base, lifting them even higher—though the ropes still dangled, held at each end by a strong man to prevent the professor from floating away—and then he turned and opened a bag of rose petals over the cheering crowd. When the clouds of roses cleared, we saw he was even higher, releasing great colored streamers that we reached to catch. And still it rose, the marvel. It was like nothing
else on earth; it had no parallel in any animal I had read of, any fairy tale or fable; it had no precedent even in my dreams. This was the human mind made real, overshadowing even the birds in its longing to be free. Are we the only animals that must escape ourselves? Because, seeing that balloon, I could imagine my own soul, trapped in the dusty acreage of my old body, burning with a flame like this and lifting away from me, just as silvered, just as new.
I felt a prod and was handed a phallus in foil.
“Little bear, this is a banana.”
Many years later, when we were both getting tired and forgetful, I reminded Hughie about the afternoon at Woodward’s Gardens when we first met below Professor Martin’s marvelous balloon. We were sitting in a roadside diner at the time, and I was getting hungrier while Hughie read the sports page of a local paper, grinning at the high school teams, his glasses down on the tip of his nose. He put down the paper and frowned.
“Balloon?” he asked. “I don’t think so.”
“Yes, it was an enormous silver balloon and you asked me what it was.”
He considered it. We were both in our late fifties, and Hughie had lost his beautiful red hair by then and gotten a bad knee that never ceased to bother him. “No, we met when my father was your tutor.”
“You’re forgetting things, Hughie. You’re an old man.”
“So are you,” he pointed out. He was right, of course, but old for me meant I looked like a small, freckled boy. I grinned my stupid grin and went back to my milk shake.
“A balloon. That’s how we became friends.”
“No, I showed you a card trick on the stairs.”
“I don’t remember you doing card tricks.”
He removed his glasses. “I came in with my father. You were trying to hide behind a door like a baby, even though you looked like Senator Roosevelt in a sailor suit. You were ridiculous. I made the queen of spades appear from the fern and you have admired me ever since.”
“Well.”
“Well.”
We both looked out the window to the parking lot, bored and restless on our travels, hoping to see something familiar out there. We went back to the paper and the growling stomach and did not speak for another hour. That is what it means to have an old friend.
We did hire his father as my tutor. I think it must have come from a conversation beneath that amazing balloon at Woodward’s Gardens. Mr. Dempsey arrived every weekday, and the most surprising part, looking back, is that Hughie came with him. I think my mother felt a child of wealth deserved undistracted tutelage, but my father finally persuaded her that I would never be an ordinary child of wealth, and that to enjoy life I would need more than one kind of tutelage. Education, yes, and language and the arts. But perhaps I also needed to learn how to be a little boy.
Hughie had figured it out without a single lesson. He arrived in his little suit and hat, smiling politely, but the moment I appeared in the hall, my books in hand, he immediately transformed into a raging bull and headed shoulder-first into my side, knocking me over and spilling papers all along the polished floors. “Man overboard!” he would cry in delight, “man overboard!” then go about picking up the papers and asking me about my day. All this was a surprise to me, and I could never think of any better response than to bean him on the head with a book of poetry
and whip his arm with a book strap. Of course I was larger, stronger, capable of lifting him above my head and dropping him over our back fence and into the pastiche little Oriental garden in the house behind ours, where I was always careful to drop him on a pillow of wild grasses. Oh how he would laugh and scream, then scamper back with a water lily behind his ear. Yet I always thought of him as the stronger. Throughout that time, I strove to impress him, to be as clever or as wild, and though I ran faster than he ever could for years, still I could never quite keep up.
You’ll say I’m lucky to have found him as a friend, a boy so willing to accept an ogre as his companion, but of course that’s the only person I would have found. A sort of crazed child. But I wonder why Hughie accepted me so quickly. It could be that he had his own oddities, of course, a clumsy sense of reality, or even a boyish self-absorption so immense that it towered over even my hulking, hound-eyed self. Perhaps he thought himself lucky to have found me, too.
But what did he think I was?
“Oh you were Max,” he told me several times over the years. “I don’t know, just Max, the way Mama was Mama and nobody else. Who knows? You were never a thing, you know. Like a toy or a dog. I knew you were a person, but not like a kid, and not like a grownup. Something else, who knows what, I didn’t care. You’re still just Max, you idiot, now give me a cigar. No, one of the nice ones.”
Childhood is remembered in the marrow, not the mind. I can’t tell you for sure what happened one day or the next, which birthday it was when Hughie wrapped a frog in ribbons and set it loose across the tea set, causing Maggie to drop the milk, screaming, or what age I was when Mother refused to change from a dress too low-cut for Father’s taste and, seeing that he would not win, he
took the sugar bowl and emptied it into her décolletage, forcing her to laugh. Or when Father took me to Meigg’s Wharf and we saw our old maid Mary, in bright makeup, holding an iris, and she ran up to us and cooed over how much younger I was growing. “You don’t look so old now, you wait, dear, your time will come.” My father made us move on without a hello. I remember how Mary stared as we left her, how she dropped the iris and it looked, there on the sidewalk, like a frozen kiss.
I could never write a true history of my childhood, because everything happened before I knew what time was, the point in my life when a promise to pick berries on Saturday would cause me to ask every few minutes, “Is it Saturday yet?” Life had no before and after, was not yet strung upon a thread, and thus cannot be brought out from the drawer intact.