Months later, back on Eighty-ninth Street, after consultation with Robert (and several practice tries from five, six, and then seven steps), I decided to leap down the entire flight between the sixth and seventh floor. At the head of the stairwell—the steps were a dark green that continued up the wall to shoulder level; there, light green took over and went on across the ceiling—sighting on the flaking, gold decalcomania on the far wall (“SIX,” half on dark green, half on light), I got ready, grinned at Robert below, who was leaning against the door and looking nervous, swung my arms back threw them forward, jumped—my foot slipped! I flailed out, suspended a moment, silent, in dead air, trajectory off!
The bottom newel post caught me in the belly, and I passed out—no more than a couple of seconds.
Robert had yanked open the door and was running for a teacher before I hit.
I should have ruptured myself. Apparently all I did, though, was knock all my air out and, temporarily and very slightly, atort my right spermatic. Because I’d gone unconscious, however, and people were wondering whether I’d hit my head, I spent the night in observation at the hospital.
In the patients’ lounge were several of those large-sized pulp magazines that I recognized as the type I’d seen (but never read) last summer at camp. I selected the one with the most interesting cover—girl, bikini, bubble-helmet, monster—and took it back to my bed and read my first two science-fiction stories.
One climaxed with a tremendous spaceship battle, the dénouement of which was someone figuring out that the death ray the enemy used was actually nothing more than light, slowed way down, so that its energy potential went way up. I don’t remember one character, or one situation besides the battle; I doubt if I would want to. But the idea, connected forever in my memory with a marvelous illustration (I’m sure it was by Virgil Finlay, though I’ve never run across the magazine again) of bubble-helmeted spacemen entering a chamber of looming vampire monsters, remains.
The other story I read that night leaves me with this recollection: Some Incredibly Ancient Aliens (in the lead illustration, they are all veined heads and bulging eyes) are explaining to someone (the hero? the villain?) that the brain is never used to full capacity by humans, but they, you see, have been using theirs, which are much larger than humans’ anyway, to full capacity now for centuries. And they are very tired.
And at school, a couple of weeks later, Robert mentioned to me that he had just read a wonderful book that I must take a look at: Rocketship Galileo. He had read it twice already. It was, he explained, probably one of the best books in the world. He even volunteered to get it out of the school library for me that afternoon (I had several books overdue and couldn’t take out any myself till they were returned), which he did . . .
Too much enthusiasm among my friends for something has often been a turn-off for me—often to my detriment. I still have not read Heinlein’s Rocketship Galileo, though Robert, after I finally returned the book to the library, unread, actually bought a copy and gave it to me.
That year’s history study was divided into one term of ancient Greek history and one term of Roman. The climax of the Greek term was a daylong Greek Festival which our class put on for the rest of the school. The morning of Festival Day, the whole school, in the auditorium, watched a play competition, where several short, original plays “on Greek themes” were performed, one of which was voted best by a board of teachers.
For that year’s Festival, I had written one of the plays (a comedy in which I took the part of Pericles—I believe he was having labor problems with the slaves over the construction of the Parthenon). It took second to a play by a girl who had muscular dystrophy, a speech impediment, and who used to cry all the time for no reason. Backstage in my toga, furiously jealous, I vigorously applauded the announcement of her triumph, among the rest of the clapping actors from the various play-companies, while she limped out on stage to receive her wreath of bay-leaves. Congratulating her, and the happy members of the cast of her play, I decided the Greek Festival was a waste.
I can only remember one dialogue exchange from my play. I hated it; another cast member had written it and insisted on inserting it, and I had finally acquiesced to keep peace. (Socrates: “How is the Parthenon coming along, Pericles?” Pericles [through gritted teeth]: “It’s all up but the columns.”) But I still have the opening of the prize-winning play by heart, with only that one morning’s viewing:
The curtains had opened and a chorus of Greek women in blue veils walked across the stage, growing light with dawn, reciting:
Persia’s ships to Attica came.
Many a thousand they were.
And like winged birds, the tribes of Greece
Attacked the Persian prey.
The women turned, walked back again—reciting what, I no longer recall. But I still remember that “attacked” as one of the most exciting words I had ever heard. Terminating the sentence with its clutch of harsh consonants, while all the other sounds fluttered behind it in memory, spoken by six ten-year-old girls at ordinary volume, it had—to me—the force of a shout.
Martha, who wore leg braces and walked funny and couldn’t talk properly and had rightfully won her prize over my glib, forgettable wise-cracks, had shown me for the first time that a single word, placed properly in a sentence, could give an effect at once inevitable, astonishing, and beautiful.
After a very un-Greek lunch in the third floor dining room, everyone went up to the tenth-floor gymnasium, where we held a junior Olympics. The boys had wrestling matches, discus throwing, high jumping, and broad jumping. The girls ran hurdle races, chariot races, and did jumping too. Then there was a final relay where boys and girls, in hiked-up togas, ran—their papier maché torches streaming crêpepaper fire—around and around the gym.
It was that dull.
In English that term we had read the Iliad and the Odyssey, as well as a good handful of traditional myths—most of which I was familiar with from My Book House. We even tackled one or two Greek plays in translation; and over one English period, Mrs. T, my favorite English teacher from my whole elementary school days, explained to us the etymology of “calligraphy,” “geology,” “optical,” “palindrome,” “obscene,” and “poet.”
In Math, to coordinate with our Greek unit, we devoted one day a week to Geometry. Using “only the tools Pythagoras accepted” (i.e., a compass and a straight edge), we went about discovering simple geometric relationships about the circle and various inscribed angles. We constructed a demonstration to show that the area of a circle, as the limit of the sum of its sectors cut ever smaller and placed alternately, approaches a parallelogram with a base of πr, and a height of r, to wit, an area of πr2And Robert gave me another book, which I did read this time, called The Black Star Passes, by John W. Campbell. Again, I remember neither plot nor characters. But I do recall that someone in it had invented a Very Powerful Mathematical Tool called “the multiple calculus,” about which author Campbell went on with ebullient enthusiasm. We had already been taught, on the other four days of the week, the basic manipulative algebraic skills, adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing polynomials. At home, I stumbled through the Encyclopedia Britannica article on Infinitesimal Calculus (which went on about somebody named Newton as enthusiastically as Campbell had gone on about his mathematician); days later I went down to the High School Library on the school’s third floor, got out a book; got out another; and then three more. Then I bought a Baron’s Review of Trigonometry. And then I got some more books.
But the school term was over again.
At summer camp that year I was assigned to a tent at the bottom of the tent colony. My iron-frame bed, which I made up that first afternoon with sheets so starched they had to be peeled apart (and the inevitable olive drab army blanket), was next to the bed of a boy named Eugene. I didn’t like him. I don’t think anybody else in the tent did either. But he made friendly attempts at conversation—mostly about his father, who, you see, edited Gala
xy: “Don’t you know what Galaxy is? It’s the science-fiction magazine! Don’t you like science fiction? Well, then what does your father do?”
“He’s an undertaker,” I said, having learned some time ago that if I said it with a steely enough voice (picked up from Channel Five reruns of Bela Lugosi films), it would shut just about anybody up, at least for a while.
Sometime in the next hour or so, Gene had a twenty-minute, hysterical crying jag and decided he wanted to go home—I don’t recall about what. I do remember thinking: This is ridiculous, I’ll never be able to put up with this next to me all summer!
I asked the counsellor if I could be assigned a bed next to someone—anyone—else. The counsellor said no.
Disappointed, I went back to my bed and was sitting on it, arranging my jeans, swimming trunks, and underwear in the wooden shelf wedged back under the sloping canvas roof, when another boy shouted: “Look out?
I dived forward onto the next bed, and rolled over to see Gene’s eight-inch hunting knife plunged through my army blanket, the two sheets and thin mattress, and heard it grate the springs. Gene, clutching the handle, stopped shaking with hysterical rage, pulled the knife free and looked about at the seven other boys in the tent, who all stared back. My blanket settled, with just the slightest wrinkle, and an inch-and-a-half slit, slightly off center.
Gene, frankly, looked as astonished as the rest of us.
Just then the counsellor (that year his name was Marty) backed up the tent steps, dragging his own trunk, and asked one of the boys to help him put it under his bed. Somebody went back to packing his shelf. Somebody else sat down on his own bed, creaking springs. Gene blinked a few times then put the knife in his top shelf, between his soap dish and his mess kit.
I left the tent, took a walk around the tent colony, watching, through the rolled-back tent flaps, the other campers unpack. Finally, I went into the creosoted bathroom shack, had diarrhea for fifteen minutes, at the end of which, with a red ball-point pen, I wrote something stupid and obscene on the wall beside something equally stupid and obscene.
In the same way I have no memory of what directly preceded our class harassment of Robert, I have no real memory of what precisely occurred just before Gene’s outburst. What had we done to him? Did I assist in it? Or do nothing to prevent it? Or did I instigate it? Conveniently, I have forgotten.
Sitting in the pine-planked stall, looking at the cracked cement flooring, I do remember thinking: If I am going to have to sleep next to this nut, I’d better make friends with him. Then I went back to my tent where Marty was asking for the choice of stories we wanted him to read us after lights-out. The vote was unanimous for Jack London.
Over the next week, occasionally I looked at the little tear in my blanket: but once the initial fear had gone, with the odd callousness of childhood, I set about making friends with Gene; there was nothing else to do.
Tuesday morning, after breakfast, Gene received in the mail, from his father, cover proofs for the two forthcoming issues of Galaxy (containing the last installment of Caves of Steel, and the first of Gladiators at Law), both covers by Emsh—Gene’s favorite sf illustrator. Perhaps a week after that, he received an advance copy of the first issue of the fantasy magazine Beyond. I borrowed it from him one afternoon and read Theodore Cogswell’s “The Wall Around the World,” which, I decided, was the best story I had ever read.
Our tent counsellor, Marty, was a graduate physics student at City College, and a science-fiction reader himself.
I asked Gene if I could lend Marty the magazine; after much debate, Gene said yes. Marty read the story, said he liked it, but that it made its point by oversimplifying things.
As we walked down the path between the girls’ bunks and an old barn building, called for some reason (there were several apocryphal stories explaining why) Brooklyn College, I asked: “Why do you say it’s oversimplified?” Porgy’s adventures on a world where magic controls one half and science the other had seemed quite the most significant construct I had encountered since slow light or the multiple calculus.
“Well,” Marty explained, as a herd of boys and girls swarmed from the ping-pong tables, out the wide doors of Brooklyn College, to troop along the road as the dinner bell, down by the dining room, donged and danged, “if you define magic as all that is not science, and science as all that is not magic—well, for one thing, you come up with a situation where, if science exists, magic must too. And we know it doesn’t. It’s much more useful to consider science a refinement of magic—that’s what it is historically. As it gets refined, there’re just fewer and fewer contradictions: It just gets more and more effective.”
And that evening, after we were all in bed, Marty, sitting back on his own bed, with a flashlight propped against his shoulder, would read us To Build a Fire, or South of the Slot, or The Shadow and the Flash.
My best friend that year at summer camp was Karen, who, though she was odd, seemed more efficient at it than Gene. She never tried to kill me; and no one ever tried to kill her.
She used to fill endless terrariums with snakes she caught in the woods. Once, when we were working together putting up screens in the camp Nature House, I interrupted her explanation of how to tell which mushrooms were and which were not Deadly Amanita, to ask her if she liked science fiction. She said no, because there weren’t any girls in it—“Or, when there are, they never do anything”—which, for all the bikinis-and-bubble-helmets, I had to admit was about true.
And Gene was unhappy at camp and went home after the first month anyway.
Back at school, Greek and Roman history were replaced by a term of medieval European history, and then a term of combined Chinese and Indian history. Our history teacher that year, a Mrs. Ethel Muckerjee, a plump, New England woman of diminutive but impressive bearing (she was one of the handful of teachers we did not call by their first name), had spent many years in India and had been the wife of the late, Indian scholar, Dan Ghopal Muckerjee, who (so went the story we told each other in hushed tones) had committed suicide some years ago when he had discovered himself victim of fatal, lingering cancer, and whose English translations of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata were, that term, our literature texts.
In class discussions, cross-legged on the vinyl floor (while, under the window seat, the radiators hissed and, occasionally, clunked), I would watch Mrs. Muckerjee, with her white hair, her gray tweeds, and her blocky-heeled shoes, lean forward in her chair and explain to the circle of us: “Now, recall the Iliad from last year. Do you see how, in the Mahabharata, the relationship of gods to men envisioned by Valmiki under his anthill is—” and here, hands on her knees, her elbows would bend—“very different from the relation held by the blind Greek, Homer . . .”
That spring, the Old Vic production of Giraudoux’s Tiger at the Gates came to New York, with Michael Redgrave. The aunt of a school friend took us to the first Wednesday Matinee during our spring vacation. From the second row, I watched while a story whose plot I knew (just as I had been told that the audiences for the original Greek drama all knew the plots beforehand too) was used to say something that struck me, at the time, as completely new. The fascinating thing to me was that the inevitability of the story was part of what was being constantly discussed on stage.
In the same week, I heard a radio production of Giraudoux’s The Apollo of Bellac, and I found it enthralling. One of our assistant teachers recommended I read some of Anouilh’s charming dramatic representations of Greek myths; Sartre’s more weighty, if less elegant, retelling of the Orestia, The Flies, came about here; and then O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Elektra and The Great God Brown.
During the term of Chinese and Indian history, we were also given a French class; our regular Natural Science teacher was taking a year off to devote himself to sculpture, and no replacement could be found. His works were on exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art, where my parents took me once to see them. Our art teacher (whose works were occasionally to be seen at the Wh
itney) used to say of his, while swinging her long arms back and forth against her gray apron: “Well, I don’t think they’re very good—too formal, too congested. But it has something . . .”
With a yellow pointer wielded in chalk-whitened fingers, Madame Geritsky, shorter than most of her pupils, made us memorize pages of French prose, which we had to recite alone and in unison, our u’s, r s, and Fs constantly corrected.
I was never a good language student: but I was a bold one. Years later, when I actually spent time in other countries, I found that, armed with the all-important sentences well memorized (“How do you say that in Greek/Italian/Turkish . . .”), I could pick up in weeks, or even days, at least temporarily, what took others months to acquire.
We reconstruct from memory a childhood that, as adults, we can bear. I think of mine as one in which I liked many people and was liked in return. If I was as happy as I remember, one reason is that I went to a school where athletic prowess and popularity were not necessarily synonymous. Among the three classes of ten to thirteen that formed our grade, there were only three boys I recall as particularly good at sports. And two of these used to vie for position as Class Bully. Everyone cordially despised them.
In gym, three mornings and three afternoons a week, we indulged in an amazingly sadistic game called “bombardment”: two teams hurled soccer balls at one another, taking prisoner anyone hit. Our gym teacher, named (I kid you not) Muscles, had several times pulled Arthur out for purposely hitting another player so hard with the ball he brought the boy to tears.
During one of my early lapses with Robert (was I seven? eight?), Arthur tried to pick a fight with me on the school roof. He was a head taller than everybody else in the class, possibly slightly older. As he was shoving me back into the wire fence at the roof’s edge, I said to myself: “This is silly!” So I announced to him that, indeed, it was silly of him to push me around: I was his friend. So he should stop. After the third time I said it, he looked perplexed and said, “Oh.” I straightened my clothes and suggested we play together. For the next two weeks I went regularly to his house in the afternoons, invited him, regularly, to mine, and spent inordinate amounts of time helping him with his arithmetic homework.