Buddies (2 page)

My classic seizure of power in the house was The War of the Antiques; but I hesitate to set it before my readers, for fear they might turn from me in disdain and contempt—as, indeed, many have done at our celebrated metropolitan brunches, or at predisco cocktail stations, even at one Thanksgiving I spent with my
Pooh
editor Jerrett and her friends, grown-up children of the sixties, of the Great American Generational Rebellion, and surely thus receptive to a saga of youthful insurgence. Shock of shocks, when I told my tale, the Thanksgiving guests sat silent in suppressed fury, the men brandishing their fists, knuckles white, and the women shaking their heads in dire sympathy for the enemy, Mother.

The antiques, yclept Mary Gregory, were vases, flagons, bowls, and utility pieces of every imaginable kind, made of colored glass and marked by silhouettes of children painted in white bas-relief. Mother conceived a fascination and began to collect, filling the house with Mary Gregory, floor to ceiling in every public room, or here or there, especially vulnerable, on little marble tables. After some years, Mother had cornered the market, for each piece was one of a kind, hand-crafted, the only version of itself there would ever be. Mother even became Known For Her Collection, an exciting suburban event. Impressively hefty magazines you couldn’t purchase in Wilkes-Barre bore her name, our name, my name; one even sent a photographer to the house, where we all posed before a particularly bulging breakfront, never knowing that I was shortly to engage a very pungent history with Mary Gregory. A true enthusiast, Mother assembled subsidiary processions of Mary Gregory’s imitators, easy to unmask, with their uncomely colors and uncouth silhouetting. It was about this time that I undertook application of Rule Five, and it seemed to me that threatening to smash whole rows of antiques might enable me to defy oppressive edicts.

Do you dare?
you ask, boys and girls? I scarcely thought about it as a dare. I saw it as a dash to freedom. Remember, reader: it’s winners and losers.

I don’t recall the issue that sparked my first sortie, but it turned into a “No, I won’t!” “Yes, you will!” contest, broken only when I moved to the nearest breakfront, placed my hand at the end of a long shelf, and proposed to shatter two bud vases, a pillbox, three cigarette holders, a stationery chestlet, a mail caddy, six barony cups, a mirror case, a matchbook trunk, and an animal bank (Mother said it was a napping cow, but it looked like a deranged yak taking a whizz) if I didn’t have my way.

Mother refused to give in and made a grab at me; foolish Mother—she knew me better than that. The ensuing crashes brought the entire family in, and the thunder was fierce. Yet I was already at another shelf, threatening, threatening. There were a few such episodes, but at length Mother had to surrender, for if I needed to I would gamely have raged through the entire Collection, and she knew it. Oddly, one piece I had had my eye on for some time ultimately eluded me: Grandpa busted that one (by accident, but then everything grandparents do is by accident). This piece was a gigantis egg, silhouetted to death and revealing, when opened, a miniature decanter and eight tiny toasting glasses. It was so spectacular—Mother said that Mary Gregory aficionados considered it the climax of the line—that we had never used it. Yet, with a sweep of his hand, inveighing in some political context, her father dashed it to the floor. The egg was so complex an architecture that the breaking noises went on for some little time, and serially, like the minuet movement in a twelve-tone suite. First, the egg itself went
crash.
Then the decanter and a glass went
floink, dizzle, kinkle.
Then the bracings gave and the egg’s outer surfaces diminished into crystal sneezes. At last the remaining glasses gave up, each with its own
kmlip.
Mother was holding me in despair: for only I, of all, knew what she was giving up.

I believe it’s that last aperçu, of the two hostiles pledging sorrowful complicity, that sets everyone off. Oh, it’s
too
much! Why was I not punished, beaten down, chained, imprisoned? We just didn’t have that kind of family. And look on the bright side: by partitioning the collection I at least drove the price up on all Mary Gregory, thereby heavily reendowing the surviving pieces.

Naturally, such exploits are designed for large families like mine, wherein the sizable cast of characters crowds the days with incident. It helps especially if one’s brothers get into trouble by themselves; this deflects attention from one’s own eccentricities. Andrew, for instance, was always losing things—hats, lunchboxes, pencil cases, a galosh. Once he came home on a rainy day missing the hood of his slicker, and it wasn’t even detachable. Mother raged. “
Why
did you lose your hood?” she kept asking. “I want to know
why!
”

Years later, he and I reviewed the event, and he pointed out how senseless these questions were. “It was an accident,” he insisted. “There is no ‘why.’ It just happened.”

“It doesn’t just happen that you lose a raincoat hood that doesn’t come off,” I told him. “That’s like losing a leg of your pants. You
did
something to it.”

“Well, what about the other times? ‘Why did you lose your hat? Why did you lose your gloves?’ That’s like asking ‘Why did you get cancer?’”

The foolish boy; one must interpret. “She didn’t mean ‘Why did you lose your hat?’” I explain. “She meant, ‘Stop losing things, you sordid fool.’”

Actually, Andrew sometimes got into scrapes that made my antique wars look like a scuffle over dominoes. A favorite example in the family is the Celebrated Pizza Incident, the most notable event of the year we spent in Venice. In the square dominated by La Fenice, the opera house, there was a trattoria with outdoor tables that served the most exquisite little pizzas to order, and, as Piazza la Fenice stood on our walk home from the Danieli boat that took us, that summer, from the Lido back to town, we became familiars of the place—Andrew in particular. He is, without question, an outstanding amateur of proletarian junk food. He would babble in his sleep, and—aside from an occasional romantic confession—the burden of his nocturnal text was “Pizza and hamburgers,” repeated over and over, sometimes for an hour. Naturally, he became the most intent of us all on afternoon pizza breaks. Sometimes Mother would agree, sometimes not. One certain day, Andrew demanded, and Mother resisted. Tomorrow, she said.

But tomorrow she was too tired. The next day.

The next day she had a headache. Another time.

No. Andrew would not budge, and the rest of us stopped to wait. There were rules about such things, at any rate a custom. One remained neutral, no more than a witness. (This suggests a corollary to Rule Five: Don’t take on your siblings’ battles. You have enough to do winning your own.)

“You said
today,
” Andrew insisted, his head bucking as if for attack.

“I have a
headache
today,” said Mother, rather dangerously.

Ned shot me a look reading, “This is not suave”—his fiercest condemnation. But Jim shot me a look reading, “Let’s see how it comes out”—for nothing failed to amuse him.

This is how it came out: Mother solemnly promised that we would have pizza tomorrow, no matter what. Not today, but—
absolutely
—tomorrow. Andrew accepted this and home we went, over the Accademia Bridge and around the corners to 127 Rio Terra dei Catecumeni. But on the way, I told Jim I was a touch worried about the grade of commitment in Mother’s promise. He said, “So what? It’s not about us, is it?” This is the converse of the corollary to Rule Five: Don’t count siblings as allies.

Anyway, the next day, when the moment came, Mother decided it was too late, too hot, and too nervous for pizza; perhaps she resented being boxed in by a promise. Or who knows what was happening?—but Andrew had her by the contract and would not yield. “You promised,” he kept saying. “You
promised.
” As we others stood around, the two of them debated it, Andrew (about ten years old then), staunch and stony, shaking with righteousness. She had put him off for days. She had left her promise. He
must
collect.

“All
right!
” Mother roared, leading us to a table. “I’ll show you!
Yes! Yes!
I’ll show you promise! Yes,
promise!
”

We ordered in an atmosphere laden with airs of betrayal and counterbetrayal. But the pizzas came, hot as hell, and Andrew, forking his in a hell-for-leather escapism, accidentally flipped it up into the air and down onto his lap.

“
So!
” Mother cried. “
Now
you see!
Now
you’ll learn! When I say
no,
it’s
no.
But you insist, do you?
So!
God hears us. God
sees!
And God will make punishment!
Yes!
”

The hot cheese was eating right through Andrew’s shorts; in fact, steam was rising in their color, and he looked as if he were in shock. Ned was regarding the façade of La Fenice as if moved to poeticize, and Tony had begun to eat his pizza. Jim simply got up, smacked the food off of Andrew’s lap with a napkin, pulled his pants off, and tossed our cold drinks at his flesh.

Andrew lived. But he glowers, even rages, when this classic tale is retold. Brothers were born to glower. You can make peace with parents eventually, but only somewhat with brothers. Actually, if possible it’s best to keep sibling combat to a minimum. Why spend energy on your fellow oppressed when the true war impends with the authorities? Besides, one should maintain diplomatic relations with one’s brothers for later years, when they come in handy for lending money, showing up at Christmas so you won’t have to, and serving as models for villains in one’s fiction.

I must admit I slipped here. Fighting with my brothers was irresistible, as stimulating as a Crusade. Unfortunately, as the middle child, I had the natural military advantage only over my two younger brothers; and one’s more instructive battles tend upward, in audacity: against older ones. Actually, Ned ignored me—he ignored the entire family and finally ran off to Europe without saying “May I?” and became a reporter for the Paris
Herald-Tribune.
But Jim and I were born to battle. He was only a year older than I, counting in years, but had a good decade on me in smarts. Some of his wisdom he passed along to me in an alternative handbook,
On the Care and Training of the Entire World,
with such rules as “Never let anyone know what you’re thinking, but make sure they hear what you say.” He was a cool number, distantly polite when my folks were around, by turns contemptuous or confidential with his siblings, slow to move but fast as the devil when he pounced: an enigma that looked you in the eye. I suppose that, given our respective natures, Jim and I could not have avoided confrontation. He liked a peaceful house, running smoothly on the theory that you verbally gave in to your parents in anything they they wanted; then unobtrusively, off the record, did as you liked.

Under public scrutiny, he was a David Copperfield, perhaps a reformed Huckleberry Finn; back on the third floor, where we kids lived, he was John Dillinger. My rebellion irritated him; smashing antiques and making provocative statements, he warned me, would “bring heat down on the whole compound.” But I could not submit to his two-faced system. I liked the clarity of honest insurrection. My way to freedom had a Tolstoyan éclat; Jim’s reptilian accommodations seemed very downtown, mean-streets, like the little white lies working-class men tell their wives when they come home late. He was pragmatic, I symbolistic. So he stepped in, to pacify me and relieve the agitation, and I found myself fighting something of a two-front war.

At least all this violence prepared me for life in New York. Long before I heard about mugging, I experienced it, in The Attack of the Moon Mice, a ritual of seek-and-destroy that Andrew and Tony concocted under the influence of horror movies, psychodrama, and Saturday morning cartoon shows. Starting in the bedroom they shared, they would crawl through the house, gnawing the ankles of any human who happened by and chanting their louche anthem, which ran, in its entirety, “
We
are the
moon
mice/We
grunch
all your
stuff!
” Reaching my room, they would crash in, snapping their jaws and trashing everything they could get ahold of before I could repel them and institute Draconian retribution. Of course they would go right for the Oz books, the records, and everything else I most valued. Worse yet, the moon mice would attack even when I wasn’t around to defend my treasures.

Once I came home late from soccer practice, exhausted and exasperated. (I know soccer is in nowadays, but in my day it was the fag sport. However, Friends Academy had no gym class. Everybody had to be on some team or other, and the only alternative, football, seemed lurid and bogus.) As I dropped my books on the kitchen table and sank into a chair I heard, in the remote distance, cries of “Grunch his puppet theatre! Grunch his theatre posters!”, the unmistakable noises of a moon mice raid. Roaring “I’ll murder you alive!”, I hurtled through the house to my room. It was a shambles, but deserted. Had they fled? Were they hiding? I sensed a presence … the closet! Fools, you have trapped yourselves. Gloating at the thought of chopping them into messes, I grabbed for the closet door. It held fast. I pulled, I tugged, I turned. No! They had locked themselves in from the inside. Damn, these crazy old houses.

“Come out of there, you cretins, and take your deserts!” I shouted.

Silence.

“I know you’re in there.”

Nothing.

“I’m going to get you if I have to rip that door off with my bare hands.”

Whispers.

“If you don’t come out by the count of three—”

The closet exploded in a hail of coats, headgear, shoes, games, and books, and out poured the moon mice in full cry. “Grunch his room!” they caroled, as I struggled to catch them. “Grunch his desk! Pull out the drawers!” Andrew exulted. “Pee in his bed,” advised Tony. The things they think of.