The Boy Detective Page 7

  But what if, in fact, they had fallen off the earth, which, as they had feared, was flat as a pancake—their great sails ballooned with wind, plowing straight ahead and then straight down, as if they’d tumbled from a kitchen shelf, into night forever? Imagine that, won’t you, as I recall an astronomy professor who gave a lecture at the Smithsonian some years ago, about a mystery concerning the human race. He stood at one end of the stage holding an orange, which he called the sun. Then he walked to the other end, holding a speck of dust, which he called the earth. He stood silent for a moment before saying, as if to himself: “Either we are alone in the universe, or we are not alone. I find both propositions equally unbelievable.” By the way, did you know that the word planet derives from the ancient Greek verb planasthai, meaning “to wander”? Well, there you go.

  To return to the hypothesis then: What if the early explorers had fallen off the flat earth instead of discovering the round earth, with all that went along with that discovery—the riches, the homes, the native women with the bare breasts and the comforting eyes? What if they fell and disappeared, and thus we had disappeared before we got started, you and I, and everything disappeared, and nothing was ever heard again of the new world, because there was no new world. Nothing. Either we fall off the flat earth, or discover a world that goes round and round indefinitely. I find both propositions equally unbelievable.

  PAUL MULDOON WONDERED how Europe felt when America left her, calling Europe a grass widow. That’s nice. The mere thought raises sentimental possibilities, not the least of which is that nations, or entire continents for that matter, are capable of longing. John Donne would have liked that thought, especially in those moments when he was packing the stars into his love affairs. Big into little. Little into big. In Gramercy Park, the caretakers used to hoist the American flag on the tall white flagpole in the morning, and fold it properly in triangles at night, when it was lowered. The same ritual took place at summer camp, when a counselor played “Reveille” on his bugle at dawn, and “Taps” at night. Not sure why my thoughts go from Muldoon to summer camp. But if Europe did long for us after our departure, the longing could have gone the other way round, I suppose, us for them. But it didn’t.

  European explorers return home. American explorers keep walking. That, in a nutshell, is the difference between European and American explorers. And, come to think of it, between Europe and America.

  HERE’S A THOUGHT: If there were a place on earth that no one had ever been, would you go there? Those explorers did that all the time. They congratulated themselves for going places where no one had ever traveled, same as E. E. Cummings, who wrote, “Somewhere I have never travelled,” referring to a different sort of trip. But these days, is it possible to find a place where no one has been, not a soul? They speak of desert islands—“If you could be on a desert island with just one book . . .”—the assumption being that once there, that’s it, and you are stuck for a lifetime in a place to which no ship will sail, and where no one has been, or ever will be, but you. You and your one book. My question is that if such a place existed would you be drawn to it?

  It’s absurd, I know. But I feel that way about certain streets in my territory, where I never have wandered before, not as a boy, not ever. How could it be that I who have covered so much ground, never walked down Thirty-first between Park and Lex? I don’t know what was here years ago, but today some unusual colonists have settled the block—Jews for Jesus, the Hai-Lan Chinese American Cultural Society, the Sukyo Mahikou Center for Spiritual Development, and Murray Hill Comedy Hours. Many thousands have walked here before, I am sure, but since this street is new to me, it becomes my Florida, my Mars. So I tread carefully, with much curiosity. What language do they speak here? What are the mores? Tell you what. Let’s build a new civilization on this spot, you and I, and replace the comedy club and Jews for Jesus with shimmering temples and great golden domes and stuff like that, a brand-new start that ensures ourselves of eternal ecstasy for everyone. No. I’m not mad. Well, maybe. A little.

  IF I WERE—mad, that is—I’d choose the madness of George C. Scott in They Might Be Giants, a favorite movie of boy detectives. The title comes from Don Quixote tilting at windmills. Scott plays a wealthy former judge thought mad by his family because he believes himself to be Sherlock Holmes, wears a deerstalker, and pursues evil. The family, wanting his money, plans to have Scott locked up in a mental hospital. The psychiatrist they engage, played by Joanne Woodward, is named Mildred Watson, so Dr. Watson is supposed to certify Holmes’s madness.

  But, as it turns out, Watson falls in with Holmes, and then in love with him, not because he is or is not crazy, but rather because his mad pursuit is just. Throughout the movie, Scott goes after Moriarty, the embodiment of evil. In the end, his family is thwarted and evil is confronted. After a wild chase through the city, Holmes faces Moriarty, who reveals himself as a blinding light. The supreme detective engages the supreme enemy on the streets of New York. When that light filled the screen, I gasped.

  HOWEVER TERRIFYING AND dismaying madness is to those who come in contact with it, still it may be mesmerizing to a child. When I was eight or so, I used to listen to Mrs. Antonetti, dressed in her nightclothes, walk up the marble stairs at the back of number 36, crying out for her baby daughter, Mary. At the time, Mary was a grown woman living in another state, but Mrs. Antonetti had it in her head that her child was still an infant, living with her on the third floor, and she searched for her on the back stairs. “Oh that Mary Antonetti,” she wailed. “Oh that Mary Antonetti. She’s always leaving home.”

  One night, I heard her wailing and I peeked out the back door of our apartment. I wanted to see Mrs. Antonetti, though I also was afraid of her. So I stood on the ninth-floor landing and listened as she ascended toward me, flight after flight. As her voice grew louder and more plaintive, I wanted to retreat into the apartment. But Mrs. Antonetti, rising in my direction, her bedroom slippers scuffling on the marble stairs, her cries coming closer, held me entranced.

  She was on the seventh floor, then the eighth, and now she approached the ninth, and me. “Oh that Mary Antonetti. She’s always leaving home.” Finally, she reached where I was standing, and looked me over, unstartled. Her hair was disheveled, and her eyes were tired. “Have you seen my Mary?” she asked. Too frightened to speak, I stood my ground. She made her way around me and proceeded to the tenth floor, disappearing where the stairs took a turn. Her voice echoed like an ambulance siren in the hall. I remained transfixed. I understood nothing about Mrs. Antonetti or her hopeless quest, except perhaps that not every tunnel has a light at the end of it.

  NO LIGHT HERE. He gropes her in an alley off Twelfth Street, between Fifth and University Place. He gropes her between Fifth and University. Well, not exactly an alley, more like a slot between two 1920s brownstones. He gropes her in the slot. And she gropes back, the two explorers like stalks of corn, vertical, rocking, oblivious of me. I ought to be oblivious of them, discreet, even if they are not. But, as the saying goes, I can’t take my eyes off them, just as they can’t take their hands off each other. It isn’t easy, their groping. They have to excavate each other under the layers of winter clothing. Their breathing makes clouds.

  Elizabeth Bishop has a poem about the mechanical nature of lovemaking, called “Edgar Allan Poe & the Juke-Box,” though it is not exactly about that. It is about being exact. It wonders if sexual pleasures, being mechanical, are premeditated. Or do they just come, as the two in the alley are about to? And what does Poe (who seems to pop up everywhere on this walk) have to do with all that—poor Edgar, who is dragged into every human strangeness, including the effects of jukeboxes upon sexual mores. Well, I suppose he asked for it, after “Marie Rogêt” and the rest. Detective Poe walks the streets downtown, passes the room with the jukebox, and plays a tune. In for a nickel.

  THE BEST DAYS are the first to flee, said Virgil. But before they do . . . The birthday party when I was six, and, after blowing out the can
dles, singing every word of “Blue Skies” for my small bewildered guests. At age four, sitting at the concert grand beside enormous Miss Jourdan, the editor and novelist, who lived upstairs with Miss Prescott, the Columbia University librarian, and Miss Cutler, the ceramicist. Accompanying my dad on rounds, and winding up at the counter at the drugstore on Twentieth and Park, the two of us hunched over ham sandwiches and black-and-white sodas. Tracking earthworms in the park. Riding an inner tube in Long Island Sound, straight to Portugal. Pears in a wooden crate. A horse’s neck, as he is about to take a jump. The sea captain’s house in Chatham, with the ship’s wheel in the living room. Snow piled like frosting on my bedroom windowsill. A road under a hard blue sky, and, though you cannot see it or smell the brine, the sea it leads to.

  And my mother, having returned home from teaching junior high English in a school on Hester Street. And her mother, Sally, lounging around our gothic museum in the late afternoons while I, the apple of their eyes, deployed brightly painted British soldiers in the Charge of the Light Brigade on the green bedroom carpet. My grandmother, whom I called Giga, big face, black hair, singing “Look for the Silver Lining.” And my mother brandishing a shawl, strutting around the bedroom, like Mae West.

  And taking walks with her in the neighborhood, to the TR Museum, or the Gramercy Bakery with its odor of lemon meringue, and the Gramercy Florist and the cold air of roses, and the milliner on Twenty-second Street. A felt suede crown. A blue feather.

  And my mother’s father, Joachim, whom I called Patta, getting off the Third Avenue El, and coming to our house from his sign-painter shop in the Bronx, and sitting at the end of my bed to tell me stories. I was five. And the night he sat there saying nothing, and I waited eagerly until finally he said in his pea-soup accent, “This time, you tell me a story.” And I: “But, Patta, I don’t have a story to tell.” And he: “Tell me something you did today.”

  So I told him about Mr. Platt, who took a bunch of the neighborhood kids to Palisades Park that afternoon, and all the wonderful rides we went on, and the go-carts, and the Ferris wheel and the waterfall, and the little pond, which I stretched to the size of a lake, and the live alligator with two teeth, one gold, one silver, that chased me up a hill into a cave where I hid beside a black bear, the two of us sitting very quietly, burying our faces in cardboard cones of cotton candy. And I saw Patta’s look of amused attentiveness, in which I also saw the power of words. And I loved what I saw.

  WHAT DID WE know back then, you and I, of treachery and lies? It was white, all whiteness, and we stood waist high in the new snow, glancing up at the laden boughs, also white, and at the whitened houses of the imperiled birds. Some days, I picked out blues on the piano. Some days, I just sang. I don’t mean once, or just one song, but a long time, much of the day. I sang “Bye Bye Blackbird” and “Molly Malone” and sang da, da, da to “Peter and the Wolf,” all the animals. Some days, I sat on the window seat in the living room and whistled. Some days, I sat at the kitchen window and dug into the sill. Some days, I played canasta with the three ladies upstairs, who, on other days, read me Tom Sawyer and The Wind in the Willows. Some days, I smeared saddle soap on my fielder’s glove and wrapped it with leather straps. Some days, I led a cavalry charge, with you at my side, pal.

  Hard to believe there was time left for anything else, such as the sneer or the sidelong glance, or the smirk one did not see but rather heard, somehow, between the nodes of the music and the membranes of light. My mother’s arms cradling groceries and flowers, and I smiling like a bright idea when she reentered the cave.

  IT’S HARD ENOUGH loving everyone, including the beasts of the school years and the petty criminals who have tried to stain every step of your life, without having to write beautiful things for the multitudes, and wishing them well in the bargain. The trouble with love when sold as cough medicine is that it can stick in your throat like a fishbone. You really have to believe what you say through and through. I mean, who the fuck can do that?

  But this is Thirty-fourth Street, where B. Altman’s used to be, with the birdcage in front of the restaurant called The Birdcage, and a white-haired hag pushes a grocery cart of vague possessions before her as she crosses at the red, causing a city bus to hiss to a stop, not to mention the cursing cars, and the furious cop—while she, self-contained as you please, doesn’t give a shit. Who could not love her?

  DETECTIVE, WRITER. Writer, detective. I tell the story of my grandfather as if he urged me on my way. But I don’t think it’s so. More likely, students, it is one of those memories we find to create patterns and connections in our lives where none exist. In the sixth grade, I wrote a poem about George Washington saying good-bye to his troops. This was not in response to an assignment. I simply was moved to do it. And I wrote things for the school literary magazine, only one of which I recall—a monologue spoken by a lawyer who had deliberately given little effort to his defense of a kid from the streets, because his client represented a lower social class. Pretty obvious stuff.

  But actually becoming a writer? I think I was more impressed by the idea of a person who worked alone and did what he liked. I relished stories about writers, movies about writers, as I did about detectives. The very word thrilled me—writer, one who imagines all of experience and creates it again. All the world sits in awe of writers, I believed, the storytellers of the race. Best of all, a writer is invisible. He tracks you down without your knowing he’s there. And he’s not there. A book is published. The writer does not have to accompany it. Go, litel bok.

  UP AND FARTHER up, I climbed the bookshelves in the living room. I would take off from the bookshelf bench, step onto the second shelf, and begin my ascent—up past the long sets of books, purchased by my parents mainly to fill the shelves. Sets of Dickens, Longfellow, Hawthorne. A set of John Greenleaf Whittier, pale green and brown, bound in a tweedlike fabric. A set of Kipling with suede covers and little swastikas, Indian symbols, on the bindings. Emerson, Austen, Thackeray. The contents of the books meant nothing to me, of course, but as artifacts, they carried mysteries. Up to Turgenev. Across to Balzac. Over to Thoreau. Up and farther up, to the shelf near the top containing the set of orange Childcraft books, which had things for grown-ups to read to children, poems and nursery rhymes, and children’s projects. A volume on drawing. A volume on health. And on the inside covers a drawing of a perfectly civilized boy and girl with a butterfly between them. One book had several pages devoted to the construction of a violin. Did they expect a child to do that? Up and farther up. Balancing my little feet in the spaces between where the books were aligned and the shelves ended. And at last there, at the top, where I could plant my hand against the ceiling, twelve feet off the ground, and look down on my mother rocking Peter, and not even knowing I was in the house.

  YOU ASK ABOUT the house? The house is everything to a good mystery, be it the grand country manor where the weekend party occurs (see Christie’s Murder for Christmas, A. A. Milne’s The Red House Mystery, or Margery Allingham’s Police at the Funeral), or the hut, or the trailer, or your place. Members of the household are prime suspects. (Did the butler ever do it? Why would you have a butler do it?) It is the house that contains the seethings and the loathings and resentments that end in murder. Someone creeps about the house. The body is discovered in the house, in the pantry, in the library. To the house the detective comes, an inspector calls, the intruder in the house who will shake up the inhabitants and rattle the cage.

  The body is discovered in the library. Yes. How often that occurs, as if the authors of mysteries instinctively are drawn to locate the murders in the room closest to their hearts. Nearly always in the great creepy old mystery movies of the 1930s and 1940s a library is shown, with floor-to-ceiling shelves spilling over with misshapen volumes rising to an indoor mist. In a cracked leather chair slumps the body, positioned by the killer to make it look like a suicide. A quick inspection, and the detective can see it wasn’t a suicide, could not have been a suicide. The angle of t
he shot is all wrong. The entry point of the bullet far too high. And the gun was in the victim’s left hand.

  All this started in England with a real case of murder, in 1860, called the Road Hill case. A three-year-old boy was found mutilated, the body stuffed down the hole in an outhouse on the grounds of a country estate in Wiltshire. The suspects were the inhabitants, family and servants. A history of insanity there. The press clamored for justice, but the police got nowhere until Inspector Jonathan Whicher—one of the first members of the London detective force—was called in. Basing his hypothesis on the missing nightdress of one of the dead boy’s half-sisters, he named her the killer, and he was proved right. Yet the public reviled him. How could a murderous child reside in the domestic sanctum, the place of safety, where all good people live? The house.

  The Road Hill murder initiated what Wilkie Collins called “a detective fever” in England and elsewhere. The Moonstone (1868) was full of facts gleaned from the Road Hill case, though Collins watered down his story, substituting a jewel thief for a murderer. People became enthralled with the pure puzzles of murder cases, perhaps because they proved to be so close to home, and all the fictional cases that followed (Marple, Holmes, and the others) had Road Hill as their point of departure. Whicher himself gave birth to the laconic, ordinary-seeming detective—Collins’s Sergeant Cuff, Chandler’s Marlowe—whom no one notices until it is too late.

  Still, the most lasting legacy of the case was the house. It constituted a world of close relationships in which anything could happen, especially something terrible, in close quarters. See the country house in Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, and the governess and the impassive children imprisoned within. See it there at dusk, looming on a hill, its windows blazing, the great front door shut tight. Black clouds settle over the fields behind the gabled roof of the silent house.