Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters & Seymour: An Introduction

  Out with it. S. loved sports and games, indoors or outdoors, and was himself usually spectacularly good or spectacularly bad at them—seldom anything in between. A couple of years ago, my sister Franny informed me that one of her Earliest Memories is of lying in a “bassinet” (like an Infanta, I gather) and watching Seymour play ping-pong with someone in the living room. In reality, I think, the bassinet she has in mind was a battered old crib on casters that her sister Boo Boo used to push her around in, all over the apartment, bumping her over doorsills, till the center of activity was reached. It’s more than possible, though, that she did watch Seymour play ping-pong when she was an infant, and his unremembered and apparently colorless opponent could easily have been myself. I was generally dazed into complete colorlessness when I played ping-pong with Seymour. It was like having Mother Kali herself on the other side of the net, multi-armed and grinning, and without a particle of interest in the score. He banged, he chopped, he went after every second or third ball as though it were a lob and duly smashable. Roughly three out of five of Seymour’s shots either went into the net or way the hell off the table, so it was virtually a volleyless game you played with him. This was a fact, though, that never quite caught his undivided attention, and he was always surprised and abjectly apologetic when his opponent at length complained loudly and bitterly about chasing his balls all over the goddam room, under chairs, couch, piano, and in those nasty places behind shelved books.

  He was equally crashing, and equally atrocious, at tennis. We played often. Especially my senior year in college, in New York. He was already teaching at the same institution, and there were many days, especially in spring, when I dreaded conspicuously fair weather, because I knew some young man would fall at my feet, like the Minstrel Boy, with a note from Seymour saying wasn’t it a marvellous day and what about a little tennis later. I refused to play with him on the university courts, where I was afraid some of my friends or his—especially some of his fishier Kollegen—might spot him in action, and so we usually went down to Rip’s Courts, on Ninety-sixth Street, an old hangout of ours. One of the most impotent stratagems I’ve ever devised was to deliberately keep my tennis racket and sneakers at home, rather than in my locker on campus. It had one small virtue, though. I usually got a modicum of sympathy while I was dressing to meet him on the courts, and not infrequently one of my sisters or brothers trooped compassionately to the front door with me to help me wait for the elevator.

  At all card games, without exception—Go Fish, poker, cassino, hearts, old maid, auction or contract, slapjack, blackjack—he was absolutely intolerable. The Go Fish games were watchable, however. He used to play with the twins when they were small, and he was continually dropping hints to them to ask him if he had any fours or jacks, or elaborately coughing and exposing his hand. At poker, too, he was stellar. I went through a short period in my late teens when I played a semi-private, strenuous, losing game of turning into a good mixer, a regular guy, and I had people in frequently to play poker. Seymour often sat in on those sessions. It took some effort not to know when he was loaded with aces, because he’d sit there grinning, as my sister put it, like an Easter Bunny with a whole basketful of eggs. Worse still, he had a habit of holding a straight or a full house, or better, and then not raising, or even calling, somebody he liked across the table who was playing along with a pair of tens.

  He was a lemon at four out of five outdoor sports. During our elementary-school days, when we lived at 110th and the Drive, there was usually a choose-up game of some kind going on in the afternoon, either on the side streets (stickball, roller-skate hockey) or, more often, on a pitch of grass, a fair-sized dog run, near the statue of Kossuth, on Riverside Drive (football or soccer). At soccer or hockey, Seymour had a way, singularly unendearing to his teammates, of charging downfield—often brilliantly—and then stalling to give the opposing goalie time to set himself in an impregnable position. Football he very seldom played, and almost never unless one team or the other was short a man. I played it constantly. I didn’t dislike violence, I was mostly just scared to death of it, and so had no real choice but to play; I even organized the damned games. On the few occasions when S. joined the football games, there was no way of guessing beforehand whether he was going to be an asset or a liability to his teammates. More often than not, he was the first boy picked in a choose-up game, because he was definitely snaky-hipped and a natural ballcarrier. If, in midfield, when he was carrying the ball, he didn’t suddenly elect to give his heart to an oncoming tackler, he was a distinct asset to his side. As I say, though, there was no real telling, ever, whether he’d help or hinder the cause. Once, at one of the very rare and savory moments when my own teammates grudgingly allowed me to take the ball around one of the ends, Seymour, playing for the opposite side, disconcerted me by looking overjoyed to see me as I charged in his direction, as though it were an unexpected, an enormously providential chance encounter. I stopped almost dead short, and someone, of course, brought me down, in neighborhood talk, like a ton of bricks.

  I’m going on too long about this, I know, but I really can’t stop now. As I’ve said, he could be spectacularly good at certain games, too. Unpardonably so, in fact. By that I mean there is a degree of excellence in games or sports that we especially resent seeing reached by an unorthodox opponent, a categorical “bastard” of some kind—a Formless Bastard, a Showy Bastard, or just a plain hundred-per-cent American bastard, which, of course, runs the gamut from somebody who uses cheap or inferior equipment against us with great success all the way down the line to a winning contestant who has an unnecessarily happy, good face. Only one of Seymour’s crimes, when he excelled at games, was Formlessness, but it was a major one. I’m thinking of three games especially: stoopball, curb marbles, and pocket pool. (Pool I’ll have to discuss another time. It wasn’t just a game with us, it was almost a protestant reformation. We shot pool before or after almost every important crisis of our young manhood.) Stoopball, for the information of rural readers, is a ball game played with the support of a flight of brownstone steps or the front of an apartment building. As we played it, a rubber ball was thrown against some architectural granite fancywork—a popular Manhattan mixture of Greek Ionic and Roman Corinthian molding—along the facade of our apartment house, about waist-high. If the ball rebounded into the street or over to the far sidewalk and wasn’t caught on the fly by someone on the opposing team, it counted as an infield hit, as in baseball; if it was caught—and this was more usual than not—the player was counted out. A home run was scored only when the ball sailed just high and hard enough to strike the wall of the building across the street without being caught on the bounce-off. In our day, quite a few balls used to reach the opposite wall on the fly, but very few fast, low, and choice enough so that they couldn’t be handled on the fly. Seymour scored a home run nearly every time he was up. When other boys on the block scored one, it was generally regarded as a fluke—pleasant or unpleasant, depending on whose team you were on—but Seymour’s failures to get home runs looked like flukes. Still more singular, and rather more to the point of this discussion, he threw the ball like no one else in the neighborhood. The rest of us, if we were normally right-handed, as he was, stood a little to the left of the ripply striking surfaces and let fly with a hard sidearm motion. Seymour faced the crucial area and threw straight down at it—a motion very like his unsightly and abominably unsuccessful overhand smash at ping-pong or tennis—and the ball zoomed back over his head, with a minimum of ducking on his part, straight for the bleachers, as it were. If you tried doing it his way (whether in private or under his positively zealous personal instruction), either you made an easy out or the (goddam) ball flew back and stung you in the face. There came a time when no one on the block would play stoopball with him—not even myself. Very often, then, he either spent some time explaining the fine points of the game to one of our sisters or turned it into an exceedingly effective game of solitaire, with the rebound from the oppos
ite building lining back to him in such a way that he didn’t have to change his footing to catch it on the trickle-in. (Yes, yes, I’m making too damned much of this, but I find the whole business irresistible, after nearly thirty years.) He was the same kind of heller at curb marbles. In curb marbles, the first player rolls or pitches his marble, his shooter, twenty or twenty-five feet along the edge of a side street where there are no cars parked, keeping his marble quite close to the curb. The second player then tries to hit it, shooting from the same starting line. It was rarely done, since almost anything could deflect a marble from going straight to its mark: the unsmooth street itself, a bad bounce against the curb, a wad of chewing gum, any one of a hundred typical New York side-street droppings—not to mention just plain, everyday lousy aim. If the second player missed with his first shot, his marble usually came to rest in a very vulnerable, close position for the first player to shoot at on his second turn. Eighty or ninety times out of a hundred, at this game, whether he shot first or last, Seymour was unbeatable. On long shots, he curved his marble at yours in a rather wide arc, like a bowling shot from the far-right side of the foul line. Here, too, his stance, his form, was maddeningly irregular. Where everybody else on the block made his long shot with an underhand toss, Seymour dispatched his marble with a sidearm—or, rather, a sidewrist—flick, vaguely like someone scaling a flat stone over a pond. And again imitation was disastrous. To do it his way was to lose all chance of any effective control over the marble.

  I think a part of my mind has been vulgarly laying for this next bit. I haven’t thought of it in years and years.

  One late afternoon, at that faintly soupy quarter of an hour in New York when the street lights have just been turned on and the parking lights of cars are just getting turned on—some on, some still off—I was playing curb marbles with a boy named Ira Yankauer, on the farther side of the side street just opposite the canvas canopy of our apartment house. I was eight. I was using Seymour’s technique, or trying to—his side flick, his way of widely curving his marble at the other guy’s—and I was losing steadily. Steadily but painlessly. For it was the time of day when New York City boys are much like Tiffin, Ohio, boys who hear a distant train whistle just as the last cow is being driven into the barn. At that magic quarter hour, if you lose marbles, you lose just marbles. Ira, too, I think, was properly time-suspended, and if so, all he could have been winning was marbles. Out of this quietness, and entirely in key with it, Seymour called to me. It came as a pleasant shock that there was a third person in the universe, and to this feeling was added the justness of its being Seymour. I turned around, totally, and I suspect Ira must have, too. The bulby bright lights had just gone on under the canopy of our house. Seymour was standing on the curb edge before it, facing us, balanced on his arches, his hands in the slash pockets of his sheep-lined coat. With the canopy lights behind him, his face was shadowed, dimmed out. He was ten. From the way he was balanced on the curb edge, from the position of his hands, from—well, the quantity x itself, I knew as well then as I know now that he was immensely conscious himself of the magic hour of the day. “Could you try not aiming so much?” he asked me, still standing there. “If you hit him when you aim, it’ll just be luck.” He was speaking, communicating, and yet not breaking the spell. I then broke it. Quite deliberately. “How can it be luck if I aim?” I said back to him, not loud (despite the italics) but with rather more irritation in my voice than I was actually feeling. He didn’t say anything for a moment but simply stood balanced on the curb, looking at me, I knew imperfectly, with love. “Because it will be,” he said. “You’ll be glad if you hit his marble—Ira’s marble—won’t you? Won’t you be glad? And if you’re glad when you hit somebody’s marble, then you sort of secretly didn’t expect too much to do it. So there’d have to be some luck in it, there’d have to be slightly quite a lot of accident in it.” He stepped down off the curb, his hands still in the slash pockets of his coat, and came over to us. But a thinking Seymour didn’t cross a twilit street quickly, or surely didn’t seem to. In that light, he came toward us much like a sailboat. Pride, on the other hand, is one of the fastest-moving things in this world, and before he got within five feet of us, I said hurriedly to Ira, “It’s getting dark anyway,” effectively breaking up the game.

  This last little pentimento, or whatever it is, has started me sweating literally from head to foot. I want a cigarette, but my pack is empty, and I don’t feel up to leaving this chair. Oh, God, what a noble profession this is. How well do I know the reader? How much can I tell him without unnecessarily embarrassing either of us? I can tell him this: A place has been prepared for each of us in his own mind. Until a minute ago, I’d seen mine four times during my life. This is the fifth time. I’m going to stretch out on the floor for a half hour or so. I beg you to excuse me.

  •

  This sounds to me very suspiciously like a playbill note, but after the last, theatrical paragraph I feel I have it coming to me. The time is three hours later. I fell asleep on the floor. (I’m quite myself again, dear Baroness. Dear me, what can you have thought of me? You’ll allow me, I beg of you, to ring for a rather interesting little bottle of wine. It’s from my own little vineyards, and I think you might just . . . ) I’d like to announce—as briskly as possible—that whatever it precisely was that caused the Disturbance on the page three hours ago, I was not, am not now, and never have been the least bit intoxicated by my own powers (my own little powers, dear Baroness) of almost total recall. At the instant that I became, or made of myself, a dripping wreck, I was not strictly mindful of what Seymour was saying—or of Seymour himself, for that matter. What essentially struck me, incapacitated me, I think, was the sudden realization that Seymour is my Davega bicycle. I’ve been waiting most of my life for even the faintest inclination, let alone the follow-through required, to give away a Davega bicycle. I rush, of course, to explain

  When Seymour and I were fifteen and thirteen, we came out of our room one night to listen, I believe, to Stoopnagle and Budd on the radio, and we walked into a great and very ominously hushed commotion in the living room. There were only three people present—our father, our mother, and our brother Waker—but I have a notion there were other, smaller folk eavesdropping from concealed vantage points. Les was rather horribly flushed, Bessie’s lips were compressed almost out of existence, and our brother Waker—who was at that instant, according to my figures, almost exactly nine years and fourteen hours old—was standing near the piano, in his pajamas, barefooted, with tears streaming down his face. My own first impulse in a family situation of that sort was to make for the hills, but since Seymour didn’t look at all ready to leave, I stuck around, too. Les, with partly suppressed heat, at once laid the case for the prosecution before Seymour. That morning, as we already knew, Waker and Walt had been given matching, beautiful, well-over-the-budget birthday presents—two red-and-white striped, double-barred twenty-six inch bicycles, the very vehicles in the window of Davega’s Sports Store, on Eighty-sixth between Lexington and Third, that they’d both been pointedly admiring for the better part of a year. About ten minutes before Seymour and I came out of the bedroom, Les had found out that Waker’s bicycle wasn’t safely stored in the basement of our apartment building with Walt’s. That afternoon, in Central Park, Waker had given his away. An unknown boy (“some shnook he never saw before in his life”) had come up to Waker and asked him for his bicycle, and Waker had handed it over. Neither Les nor Bessie, of course, was unmindful of Waker’s “very nice, generous intentions,” but both of them also saw the details of the transaction with an implacable logic of their own. What, substantially, they felt that Waker should have done—and Les now repeated this opinion, with great vehemence, for Seymour’s benefit—was to give the boy a nice, long ride on the bicycle. Here Waker broke in, sobbing. The boy didn’t want a nice, long ride, he wanted the bicycle. He’d never had one, the boy; he’d always wanted one. I looked at Seymour. He was getting excited. He was ac
quiring a look of well-meaning but absolute inaptitude for arbitrating a difficult dispute of this kind—and I knew, from experience, that peace in our living room was about to be restored, however miraculously. (“The sage is full of anxiety and indecision in undertaking anything, and so he is always successful.”—Book XXVI, The Texts of Chuang-tzu.) I won’t describe in detail (for once) how Seymour—and there must be a better way of putting this, but I don’t know it—competently blundered his way to the heart of the matter so that, a few minutes later, the three belligerents actually kissed and made up. My real point here is a blatantly personal one, and I think I’ve already stated it.

  What Seymour called over to me—or, rather, coached over to me—that evening at curb marbles in 1927 seems to me Contributive and important, and I think I must certainly discuss it a little. Even though, somewhat shocking to say, almost nothing seems more contributive and important in my eyes at this interval than the fact of Seymour’s flatulent brother, aged forty, at long last being presented with a Davega bicycle of his own to give away, preferably to the first asker. I find myself wondering, musing, whether it’s quite correct to pass on from one pseudo-metaphysical fine point, however puny or personal, to another, however robust or impersonal. That is, without first lingering, lolling around a bit, in the wordy style to which I’m accustomed. Nonetheless, here goes: When he was coaching me, from the curb-stone across the street, to quit aiming my marble at Ira Yankauer’s—and he was ten, please remember—I believe he was instinctively getting at something very close in spirit to the sort of instructions a master archer in Japan will give when he forbids a willful new student to aim his arrows at the target; that is, when the archery master permits, as it were, Aiming but no aiming. I’d much prefer, though, to leave Zen archery and Zen itself out of this pint-size dissertation—partly, no doubt, because Zen is rapidly becoming a rather smutty, cultish word to the discriminating ear, and with great, if superficial, justification. (I say superficial because pure Zen will surely survive its Western champions, who, in the main, appear to confound its near-doctrine of Detachment with an invitation to spiritual indifference, even callousness—and who evidently don’t hesitate to knock a Buddha down without first growing a golden fist. Pure Zen, need I add—and I think I do need, at the rate I’m going—will be here even after snobs like me have departed.) Mostly, however, I would prefer not to compare Seymour’s marble-shooting advice with Zen archery simply because I am neither a Zen archer nor a Zen Buddhist, much less a Zen adept. (Would it be out of order for me to say that both Seymour’s and my roots in Eastern philosophy—if I may hesitantly call them “roots”—were, are, planted in the New and Old Testaments, Advaita Vedanta, and classical Taoism? I tend to regard myself, if at all by anything as sweet as an Eastern name, as a fourth-class Karma Yogin, with perhaps a little Jnana Yoga thrown in to spice up the pot. I’m profoundly attracted to classical Zen literature, I have the gall to lecture on it and the literature of Mahayana Buddhism one night a week at college, but my life itself couldn’t very conceivably be less Zenful than it is, and what little I’ve been able to apprehend—I pick that verb with care—of the Zen experience has been a by-result of following my own rather natural path of extreme Zenlessness. Largely because Seymour himself literally begged me to do so, and I never knew him to be wrong in these matters.) Happily for me, and probably for everybody, I don’t believe it’s really necessary to bring Zen into this. The method of marble-shooting that Seymour, by sheer intuition, was recommending to me can be related, I’d say, legitimately and un-Easternly, to the fine art of snapping a cigarette end into a small wastebasket from across a room. An art, I believe, of which most male smokers are true masters only when either they don’t care a hoot whether or not the butt goes into the basket or the room has been cleared of eyewitnesses, including, quite so to speak, the cigarette snapper himself. I’m going to try hard not to chew on that illustration, delectable as I find it, but I do think it proper to append—to revert momentarily to curb marbles—that after Seymour himself shot a marble, he would be all smiles when he heard a responsive click of glass striking glass, but it never appeared to be clear to him whose winning click it was. And it’s also a fact that someone almost invariably had to pick up the marble he’d won and hand it to him.