First Citizen (2 page)

We lived in a gray-shingled saltbox set on a half-acre of wooded land. Some of the lot was lawn on a layer of black topsoil, and some was the original coastal pines growing out of their own duff and sand. The house had real plaster walls, not just gypsum board—as I discovered by knocking a few holes with a hammer. So it must have been a real, one-of-a-kind, historical place and not some real estate developer’s twenty-at-a-time subdivision. But I was too young to understand the difference then.

The backyard, where the pine needles were inches thick, had blueberry bushes growing like weeds. That was my only taste of fruit discovered by my own hands and tested for ripeness with my own tongue: those blueberries and the wild, once-a-season, solitary, sour strawberry that would grow in the lawn. All my other fruits and jams came out of a can, a jar, or a waxpaper-lined bin at the grocery store.

My hands and the points of my knees were always dirty with pine pitch, grass stains, loam, chalk dust, and grease from the wheels of, first, my little red wagon and, later, a bicycle. I always had a scrape or a cut somewhere on my hands and shins, and every summer my face and arms were puffed by mosquito bites or poison ivy. How durable and flexible we were as children; how stiff and brittle we become as adults.

The school at Marblehead quickly taught me to keep my first name a secret. Who wants to go around as Granny-Fanny all the time? So I went as Jay and sometimes James. For some reason never Jim, except to those who didn’t know me at all and were trying to be familiar.

It would take me thirty years to learn the psychological advantages of letting people use a mildly embarrassing nickname. It lets them think they own a piece of you, and that binds them to you.

The school also taught me how to fight. Or, anyway, how
not
to fight. Little Granny got his Fanny pushed out of shape once too often by the childish taunts and lashed out with his tiny clenched fists. A fair, brown-haired boy, named Gordy Somebody-or-other, got in the way of my first, ill-timed swing and went down with a smear of blood in his nose. He probably deserved it, having been at the front of the circle calling names. He may even have started the whole thing.

First lesson: It doesn’t matter who starts a fight, just who finishes it. That incident also taught me about crowd psychology. I was preoccupied with the satisfying
snap
his head had made going back—and with the good feeling of standing over an enemy whom I had personally brought low—when the first counter blow caught the small of my back. I could feel the sickening shock of it in my kidneys and almost threw up. Then the circle closed over me in a wave of mittened hands, corduroy jacket sleeves, and scuffed Keds.

Second lesson: A crowd decides, with its own logic and in its own quick time, who wins and who loses. The crowd is the voice of history, and its version is official. I suffered a black eye, a split lower lip, and two red stars on my conduct card for fighting on school grounds. After that, I kept my name and my hands to myself.

At the age of eleven I nearly died, and took my sister Clarice with me, all on a childish conceit.

We had gone sailing one Sunday afternoon in a rented pram. That’s an eight-foot open boat with a single dacron sail, just right for children puddling around the marina docks. We’d gotten this crazy idea, mostly mine, I guess, that we were going to sail off to Georges Bank and visit Father. Our imaginations put this mythical place about two miles beyond the town breakwater, just out of sight over the horizon. We happen to have picked the day of that summer’s worst storm, but then, children do not listen to the Marine Band’s weather channel.

The black clouds came up fast from the south as we rounded the tip of the breakwater. A water-smart child would have turned back immediately, but we were landlubbers at heart. I had pretty easily learned how to make the boat turn this way and that, and had figured out that we had to keep the bladelike centerboard down in the water by hooking our feet under the seats and leaning way out over the high side. That was enough success; so I thought we could sail the little boat anywhere, even into the coming black rain.

Of course, I had not considered the wind and how it might be a lot stronger at sea, with no houses or trees to break its force. The first squall bent the aluminum tube of the mast sideways, like a soda straw crimped on the edge of a glass tumbler. It also flipped the boat so hard that Clary and I were catapulted out and about ten feet downwind.

Right there, I did the first brilliant thing in my life: I figured out that we should stay with the boat. Even when it was upside down, had a bent mast, and was drifting out to sea. Even when the shore looked close and we were both good swimmers.

I towed Clary back to the overturned pram, boosted her up and clamped her hands around the stubby keel. Clary is normally a pretty tough lady, but that day she was gritting her teeth and rolling her eyes like a bad trip on O-dyne. She was also beginning to freeze in that cold water, being a lot smaller than I was.

The waves were like long-fingered ghosts pulling at our legs, pushing at our arms and chests. While the wind sang in our ears, the waves chanted: “Come with me ... go with us ...”

Clary must have heard that song, too. Out of her throat came a tiny whimper, “No-oo.”

Then I started talking to her, talking around my chattering teeth and shuddering lungs, about holding on and how soon somebody—Mother, Father, the man who rented us the boat and wanted it back—would certainly be looking for us, even with the rain and wind and all.

For six hours it went on like that. We held on while the storm passed and the water smoothed and the golden light of a summer evening broke over the shoreline, some miles away. Clary sobbed quietly with fright and the cold, and I gabbled about holding on and rescue coming soon.

Toward the end, when the cold was really beginning to get to me, so that my fingers and feet were like amputated stumps, my body stopped shivering and went hard inside. A white flame burned deep inside my chest. I thought it was my soul. Its light was without a flicker, like the cold white flash, edged with all colors, that I had once seen deep inside Mother’s wedding diamond. I knew then that it would take a lot more than fifty-degree water and a summer rainstorm to put out that flame.

I talked to Clary about the white flame and told her she had one inside her, too. The way she screwed up her face with concentration showed she was trying to believe it and not doing very well. I fanned that little fire with words until she admitted that, yes, she had one too.

It was almost eight o’clock and getting dark when the police patrol boat from the Town Dock found us. An old man in oilskins—not my father—pulled us off the turtled hull of the pram and wrapped us in blankets. He looked like the fisherman’s statue come alive.

Mother was waiting on the dock and publicly cried over her draggled, shriveled babies for ten minutes. However, in our station wagon on the drive home she straightened and set her mouth.

“You’ve made a spectacle of yourself,” she said to me. The tears in her eyes turned into a gleam of contempt.

“I just—”

“Please don’t tell me what you were doing in that silly little boat. I don’t want to know. Clearly, you were careless and got in over your head—although I can’t imagine where you thought you could sail a boat like that. You not only risked your own life but your sister’s as well.”

“Momma,” Clary started, “he was just—”

“I meant it when I said don’t tell me.”

Mother took a breath, as if to begin again. “You are a Scoffield. And a Corbin. It’s your responsibility, James, to set an example for those about you. Live so that they can see how it should be done. Not so they have to come along and pull you and your sister out of the water. That’s a weakness.

“Now, you’ll never do a thing like that again, will you?”

“No, Momma,” we chorused.

There was more, but I forget most of it. What stood out was Mother’s absolute belief in
politesse oblige.
Her family, her social set were destined to civilize the crawling masses who were not fortunate enough to be Scoffields. Or Corbins. As Clary and I grew up, the simple lessons of right and wrong were too obvious for Mother. Instead she taught us to distinguish grandeur from
gaucherie,
seemly behavior from eccentric bombast,
beaux gestes
from rude gaffes, and personal freedom from plodding conformity.

Of course, it
was
remarkably stupid of me to try sailing an open pram out to the Georges Bank. If she had known that was my plan, Mother would have whinnied that high laugh of hers and called me an utter fool. Thanks to Clary it remained a secret between us until we were all too old to care. But I never forgot.

Somehow, in the excitement of finding and bringing us children back to port, all the grownups forgot that I had broken the rule of the boat rental place about staying in the harbor. Everyone, that is, except the owner. He tried to sue my family for the loss of the pram. Father in turn sued him for negligence in renting to obvious minors. The matter dragged listlessly through our respective lawyer’s offices until the family moved to California.

For political or environmental or some other unreal reason, the oil never came in on the Bank. So Father was off to the other side of the country. Mother went happily because she remembered trips to California—Santa Monica and the LA Basin—as a girl and she thought the Monterey coast would be almost as nice.

It was nicer.

Jennifer Corbin settled into the art galleries of Carmel the way a tent caterpillar settles into an apple orchard. Father sailed the offshore fault system, dropping charges and scaring the people.

We lived in a mock adobe house—gunnite shot through chicken wire and troweled until it looked half-melted, like cake frosting on a hot day—in Pacific Grove, right outside the gate of the Asilomar center. That house had two and a half tons of glass sliding in doors and windows, all on ball bearings, and an acre of ultra-white carpeting you couldn’t walk on but had to keep to the clear plastic runners. I didn’t spend much time there.

Pacific Grove was west of the action, and I don’t remember how I got around. Too young to drive and but-nobody rode what buses there were. I hitched a ride with friends or clean-looking strangers, I guess. Most of the time it didn’t lead to trouble. And when it did, I could handle it.

My place was Cannery Row, fifty years after Steinbeck, when the canneries were gone except as building shells. And in these, like bold hermit crabs in weathered surroundings, were established the latest designer bars, the tourist galleries, the street artists, the rock bands, and the pushers. It was like a permanent, genteel carnival. Just perfect for a boy turned thirteen who could think this slice of plastique was adult life.

And then, for two weeks every summer, Mother retreated to Copenhagen; for two weeks in winter, to Venice and Florence. Clary and I ate ice cream in our hotel, picked up Danish and Italian from the local television, and never asked about the giggles and thumps coming through the wall from Mother’s room. All thirteen-year-olds are hardened realists. I told Clary that Mother was playing adult games in there. I suppose she was.

The taste for drama, like the taste for love, has come and gone with most boys by the time they reach thirteen. It died especially fast for boys coming of young age in mid-’80s America, when drama was lighted with phosphor images of kung fu fists and hurtling cars, when love was sticky with rock video, zip-tab cola, and pinches of coke. I remember being a coldly rational child, too old for my years. I parceled out my emotions and my flights of fancy the way a miser parts with gold.

For example, we used to play football, shirts versus skins, in a narrow park with an inconvenient pathway—a strip of bare, packed dirt—running right across the widest part of the field. The game was supposed to be touch football, but everyone got to tackling when the runners kept ignoring the two-hand fanny slap and no one called them on it. I watched as one of my teammates, a skin, took a tackle on the edge of this dirt, rolled, and came up with a red patch looking like shiny paint across his shoulders. It proved his manhood, presumably.

Two plays later I had the ball and found myself bearing down on the same edge of path with one shirt just a stride and a half behind me and two more closing from the grass side. No slap on the rear was going to satisfy them, and flying face-first across that dirt was going to hurt enormously. And for what? A scratch game of football, the teams chosen and their loyalty bonded with the casual point of a finger. So I stepped out of bounds deliberately and, to keep the man behind from tackling me anyway, got down on one knee.

“Coward!” yelled the first side blocker.

“Faggot wimp,” tossed in the second.

The one behind punched my shoulder as he ran by.

It was just a friendly game.

Given no strong directions, a poor boy will function as the economists’ Rational Man. That is, he will capitalize on his opportunities according to his nature—engaging either in dealing and light-finger if he’s a talker or strong-arm and territorial warfare if he’s a doer. A rich boy with no direction, however, will go precisely nowhere. And that’s where I was headed.

That summer, I was hanging around a locksmith’s shop, going on calls with him, doing some cleanup, nothing he was actually paying me for. The training he gave me in return—just letting me watch, examine his tools, and occasionally try my touch—was probably a breach of his code of ethics and illegal to boot. He thought I was just a clean-cut kid from Asilomar, and I thought I was going to be an international jewel thief.

That was the summer, too, that I started karate—another facet of my secret agent self. Just about everyone in my class at school took a six-week course in quote self-defense unquote. Some of us followed it up with a short-lived enrollment at Kan’s down on the mall. But I stayed with it four years, in the end becoming a part-time, unpaid teacher for Sensei Kan.

Karate is the ultimate bore. You practice each move—which itself is made up of smaller, more precise moves of muscle and tendon—over and over until your arm or leg glides like a programmed robot. Then you combine the moves into sequences, and the sequences into extended imaginary fights, the
katas.
It’s more like ballet than fighting.