Joe Gould's Secret (6 page)

One morning in the summer of 1942, sitting in my office at
The New Yorker
, I thought of Gould—I had seen him on the street the night before—and it occurred to me that he might be a good subject for a Profile. According to some notes I made at the time—I made notes on practically everything I had to do with Gould, and I found these in the file drawer with the rest of the Gould memorabilia—it was the morning of June 10, 1942, a Wednesday morning. I happened to be free to start on something new, so I went in and spoke to one of the editors about the idea. I remember telling the editor that I thought Gould was a perfect example of a type of eccentric widespread in New York City, the solitary nocturnal wanderer, and that that was the aspect of him that interested me most, that and his Oral History, and not his bohemianism; in my time, I had interviewed a number of Greenwich Village bohemians and they had seemed to me to be surprisingly tiresome. The editor said to go ahead and try it.

I was afraid that I might have trouble persuading Gould to talk about himself—I really knew next to nothing about him, and had got the impression that he was austere and aloof—and I decided that I had better talk with some people who knew him, or were acquainted with him, at least, and see if I could find out the best way to approach him. I left the office around eleven and went down to the Village and began going into places along Sixth Avenue and bringing up Gould's name and getting into conversations about him with bartenders and waiters and with old-time Villagers they pointed out for me among their customers. In the middle of the afternoon, I telephoned the switchboard operator at the office and asked if there were any messages for me, as I customarily did when I was out, and she immediately switched me to the receptionist, who said that a man had been sitting in the reception room for an hour or so waiting for me to return. “I'll put him on the phone,” she said. “Hello, this is Joe Gould,” the man said. “I heard that you wanted to talk to me, so I dropped in, but the thing is, I'm supposed to go to the clinic at the Eye and Ear Infirmary, at Second Avenue and Thirteenth Street, and pick up a prescription for some eye trouble I've been having, and if it's one kind of prescription it won't cost anything but if it's another kind it may cost around two dollars, and I've just discovered that I don't have any money with me, and it's getting late, and I wonder if you'd ask your receptionist to lend me two dollars and you can pay her back when you come in and we can meet any time you say and have a talk and I'll pay you back then.” The receptionist broke in and said that she would lend him the money, and then Gould came back on the phone and we agreed to meet at nine-thirty the next morning in a diner on Sixth Avenue, in the Village, called the Jefferson. He suggested both the time and the place.

When I got back to the office, I gave the receptionist her two dollars. “He was a terribly dirty little man, and terribly nosy,” she said, “and I was glad to get him out of here.” “What was he nosy about?” I asked. “Well, for one thing,” she said, “he wanted to know how much I make; Also,” she continued, handing me a folded slip of paper, “he gave me this note as he was leaving, and told me not to read it until he got on the elevator.” “You have beautiful shoulders, my dear,” the note said, “and I should like to kiss them.” “He also left a note for you,” she said, handing me another folded slip of paper. “On second thought,” this note said, “nine-thirty is a little early for me. Let us make it eleven.”

The Jefferson—it is gone now—was one of those big, roomy, jukeboxy diners. It was on the west side of Sixth Avenue, at the conjunction of Sixth Avenue, Greenwich Avenue, Village Square, and Eighth Street, which is the heart and hub of the Village. It stayed open all day and all night, and it was a popular meeting place. It had a long counter with a row of wobbly-seated stools, and it had a row of booths. When I entered it, at eleven, Gould was sitting on the first counter stool, facing the door and holding his greasy old pasteboard portfolio on his lap, and he looked the worst I had ever seen him. He was wearing a limp, dirty seersucker suit, a dirty Brooks Brothers button-down shirt with a frayed collar, and dirty sneakers. His face was greenish gray, and the right side of his mouth twitched involuntarily. His eyes were bloodshot. He was bald on top, but he had hair sticking out in every possible direction from the back and sides of his head. His beard was unkempt, and around his mouth cigarette smoke had stained it yellow. He had on a pair of glasses that were loose and lopsided, and they had slipped down near the end of his nose. As I came in, he lifted his head a little and looked at me, and his face was alert and on guard and yet so tired and so detached and so remotely reflective that it was almost impassive. Looking straight at me, he looked straight through me. I have seen the same deceptively blank expression on the faces of old freaks sitting on platforms in freak shows and on the faces of old apes in zoos on Sunday afternoons.

I went over and introduced myself to Gould, and he instantly drew himself up. “I understand you want to write something about me,” he said, in a chipper, nasal voice, “and I greet you at the beginning of a great endeavor.” Then, having said this, he seemed to falter and to lose confidence in himself. “I didn't get much sleep last night,” he said. “I didn't get home. That is, I didn't get to the flophouse I've been staying in lately. I slept on the porch at St. Joseph's R.C. until they opened the doors for the first Mass, and then I went in and sat in a pew until a few minutes ago.” St. Joseph's, at Sixth Avenue and Washington Place, is the principal Roman Catholic church in the Village and one of the oldest churches in the city; it has two large, freestanding columns on its porch, behind which, shielded from the street, generations of unfortunates have slept. “I died and was buried and went to Hell two or three times this morning, sitting in that pew,” Gould continued. “To be frank, I have a hangover and I'm broke and I'm terribly hungry, and I'd appreciate it very much if you'd buy me some breakfast.”

“Of course,” I said.

“Fried eggs on toast!” he called out commandingly to the counterman. “And let me have some coffee right away and some more with the eggs. Black coffee. And make sure it's hot.” He slid off the stool. “If you're having something,” he said to me, “call out your order, and let's sit in a booth. The waitress will bring it over.”

We took a booth, and the waitress brought Gould's coffee. It was in a thick white mug, diner style, and it was so hot it was steaming. Even so, tipping the mug slightly toward him without taking it off the table, he bent down and immediately began drinking it with little, cautious, quick, birdlike sips and gulps interspersed with little whimpering sounds indicating pleasure and relief, and almost at once color returned to his face and his eyes became brighter and his twitch disappeared. I had never before seen anyone react so quickly and so noticeably to coffee; brandy probably wouldn't have done any more for him, or cocaine, or an oxygen tent, or a blood transfusion. He drank the whole mug in this fashion, and then sat back and held his head on one side and looked me over.

“I suppose you're puzzled about me,” he said. His tone of voice was condescending; he had got some of his confidence back. “If so,” he continued, “the feeling is mutual, for I'm puzzled about myself, and have been since childhood. I seem to be a changeling or a throwback or a mutation of some sort in a highly respectable old New England family. Let me give you a few biographical facts. My full name is Joseph Ferdinand Gould, and I was named for my grandfather, who was a doctor. During the Civil War, he was surgeon of the Fourth Regiment, Massachusetts Volunteers, and later on he was a prominent obstetrician in Boston and taught in the Harvard Medical School. The Goulds, or my branch of them, have been in New England since the sixteen-thirties and have fought in every war in the history of the country, including King Philip's War and the Pequot War. We're related to many of the other early New England families, such as the Lawrences and the Clarkes and the Storers. My grandmother on my father's side was a direct descendant of John Lawrence, who arrived from England on the
Arbella
in 1630 and was the first Lawrence in this country, and she could trace her ancestry back to a knight named Robert Lawrence who lived in the twelfth century. She used to say that the Lawrence line, or this particular Lawrence line, was not only one of the oldest clearly traceable lines in New England but also one of the oldest clearly traceable lines in England itself, and that we should never forget it.”

Gould abruptly began scratching himself. He went about it unself-consciously. He scratched the back of his neck, and then he thrust his hand inside his shirt and scratched his chest and ribs.

“I should've been born in Boston,” he continued, “but I wasn't. My father, whose name was Clarke Storer Gould, was also a doctor. He was a Bostonian, but he had been prevailed upon to move out and practice in Norwood, Massachusetts, and he and my mother had been living there only a few months when I was born. Norwood is a fairly good-sized old Yankee town about fifteen miles southwest of Boston. It's a residential suburb, and it also has some printing plants and some sheepskin tanneries and an ink factory and a glue works. I was born at high noon on September 12, 1889, in a flat over Jim Hartshorn's meat market. In Norwood, by the way, that's pronounced ‘Jim Hatson.' A year or so later, my father built a big house on Washington Street, the main street of Norwood. Four-eighty-six Washington Street. It had three stories and twenty-one rooms, and it had gables and dormers and ornamental balconies and parquet floors, and it was one of the show places of Norwood. There was a mirror in our front hall that was eight feet high and decorated with gold cherubim. There were beautiful terra-cotta tiles around the fireplaces. There were diamond-shaped windows at the stair landings, and they had red, green, purple, and amber panes.

“As I said, my grandfather and my father were doctors, and when I was growing up I was well aware that my father hoped I would follow in his footsteps, just as he had followed in
his
father's footsteps. He never said so, but it was perfectly obvious to me and to everybody else that that was what he wanted. I loved my father, and I wanted him to think well of me, but I knew from the time I was a little boy and fainted at the sight of blood when I happened to see our cook wring the neck of a chicken that I was going to be a disappointment to him, because I really couldn't stand the idea of being a doctor; I kept it to myself, but that was the last thing in the world I wanted to be. Not that I had anything else in mind. The truth is, I wasn't much good at anything—at home or at school or at play. To begin with, I was undersized; I was a runt, a shrimp, a peanut, a half-pint, a tadpole. My nickname, when anybody thought to use it, was Pee Wee. Also, I was what my father called a catarrhal child—my nose ran constantly. Usually, when I was supposed to be paying attention to something, I was busy blowing my nose. Also, I was just generally inept. Not long ago, looking up something in the unabridged dictionary, I came across a word that sums up the way I was then, and, for that matter, the way I am now—‘ambisinistrous,' or left-handed in both hands. My father didn't know what to make of me, and I sometimes caught him looking at me with a thoughtful expression on his face.”

Gould stood up and took off his lopsided glasses and peered desperately at the counterman, who was evidently putting off starting on Gould's order until he had attended to everyone else in the diner, including some people who had come in after we had sat down, but the counterman deliberately ignored him and would not let him catch his eye.

“Anyhow,” Gould went on, sitting back down resignedly, “when I was around thirteen, a couple of things happened that showed me pretty clearly where I stood in the world. At school, we used to do a lot of marching two by two. We'd march into assembly two by two, and we'd march out to recess two by two. I could never keep in step, so they used to put me on the end of the line and I'd bring up the rear, marching by myself. This particular day, I had been kept in after school, and the teacher had let me go to the library room to pick out a book to read, and I was alone in there and out of sight, squatting down at a bookcase in the back of the room trying to decide between two books, when the principal of the school, who was a man, came in with one of the men teachers, the math teacher. They each dumped some books down on the desk, and then they stood there for a few moments, talking about one thing and another, and all of a sudden I heard the principal say, ‘Did you notice the Gould boy today?' The math teacher said something I didn't catch, and then the principal said, ‘The disgusting little bastard can't even keep in step with himself.' The math teacher laughed and said something else I didn't catch, and then they went on out.

“Now, it so happened my father was on the school board and took a great interest in the school, and he and the principal saw quite a lot of each other. They were really very good friends; the principal and his wife used to come to our house for dinner, and my father and mother used to go to their house for dinner. Consequently, I was deeply shocked by the principal's remark. It hurt to overhear myself being called a disgusting little bastard, but it was the disrespect to my father that hurt the most. The Gould boy! That brought my father into it. If he had just said ‘Joseph Gould,' it wouldn't've been so bad. It would've confined it to me. I felt that the principal had insulted my father. I felt that he had betrayed him. At the very least, he had made fun of him behind his back. In some strange way, it made me feel closer to my father than I had ever felt before, and it made me feel sorry for him—it made me want to make it up to him. So that night, after supper, I went into the parlor, where he was sitting reading, and I said to him, ‘Father, I've been doing some thinking lately about what I'd like to be, and I've decided I'd like to study medicine and be a surgeon.' I thought it would please him twice as much if I said I wanted to be a surgeon. ‘That'll be the day,' my father said. ‘If you
did
become a surgeon, and if you performed operations the way you do everything else, when you got through with a patient you'd have his insides so balled up you'd have his heart hanging upside down and his liver turned around backward and his intestines wound around his lungs and his bladder joined on to his windpipe, and you'd have him walking on his hands and breathing through his behind and making water out of his left ear.'”