Memoir From Antproof Case (49 page)

My father wanted me to avoid the tower not because he was afraid I would take up bad ways—it is very hard for a boy of nine to sin even if he wants to—but because he wanted to keep me from familiarity with bad ways. What is necessary is not so much that parents set a good example for their children but that they fail to set a bad example. The important thing is not that you see your father, to consider the case of the town barber, industriously carving wooden monkeys, but rather that you do not see him smoking opium or kicking small animals. If, for example, parents did not familiarize their children with the drinking of coffee, the children would no sooner drink coffee than they would spend all their money on tattoos.

The town of Ossining in those days was publicly sinless, all vices and most virtues being learned and practiced, if at all, at home. Thus, by following the Ten Commandments and then some, my parents were getting me off to a good start. The tower, however, was the seat of dangers and petty sins of all descriptions.

The underlying condition there, something not a vice itself but in its way an anteroom to the world of vice, was that this place was open all night. As a switching station on the Hudson Line of the New York Central Railroad, it had to be. The lights were always on, the little bulbs on the trackboard flashed as trains drew close or moved away, the telephone rang at all hours, and, often, a Victrola would play long past the time that almost everyone else in town was asleep, its horn pointed out the
window at the river, because the music was too loud when it echoed from the windows that overlooked the tracks.

Though they were not supposed to have it, the switchmen kept a bottle of scotch in a compartment of the wainscotting. Had they abused this bottle, it might have been quite tricky for them to read all the lights that jumped around the trackboard like fireflies and glowworms, or to pull the proper lever in the long black line of switches that looked like rifles stacked in an arsenal. So they had a rule, which was that neither of them could take a drink without the other also taking a drink, and that only one bottle was allowed in the tower at any one time. Thus, they were automatically restricted to half a bottle per shift, which, I suppose, was lucky for the crowded passenger trains and heavily laden freights shuttling in opposite directions at seventy miles per hour each.

The practice of hiding a bottle in the wainscotting first introduced me to one of the rare beauties in the American system of justice. I was in the tower one day, in a snowstorm, excitedly awaiting the passage of the plow train, when a freight approached from the south. Because they anxiously awaited the plow, which was to appear from the north at any minute, the switchmen neglected to throw one of their switches, and the northbound freight derailed and flew into the swamp, leaving two engines, a coal car, and three others semisubmerged, while the forty or fifty freight cars behind them simply sat at the edge of the track.

It felt as if the waters of a flood had risen in the room up to our necks. The two switchmen knew instantly that they had lost their jobs, that their families were imperiled, and that, if anyone had died, they themselves would live the rest of their lives only half alive or less. And all because they had been as excited as I was about seeing a plow train.

And then the plow train came through even before we knew if anyone had been hurt. It blazed down the track, its bright light making hash of the blizzard, and left a clear path behind it.

Before they or I began to run on the cleared track toward the swamp, we had an instantaneous trial in which the switchmen, who were the defendants, represented themselves, and I was prosecutor, investigator, judge, and jury. This trial took about ten seconds, but it was as fine an example of justice as any I've seen. One of the men quickly lifted the board in the wainscotting and pointed to the bottle. "Look, kid," he said. "The seal isn't even broken." It was not broken. The bottle was full. As seconds went by I realized my role in all this, and I nodded, saving them from an unnecessary crucifixion, for I knew exactly why they had been remiss, and I agreed not to complicate things by bringing up the existence of the bottle.

While one put in the derailment call, the other sped up the track. A few minutes later he came back with some wet and muddy trainmen who refused even to look at us. When the two switchmen left that evening they took their things, and they never returned. All night long the derailment crews worked through the blizzard to get the freight back on the track, and we could see the glow of their floodlights from the windows of our house. The officially stated reason for the accident was that it had occurred in blizzard conditions—something that was true at its very heart, although the railroad did not know it.

The next day came as if nothing had happened. The freight was gone, the track repaired, the depressions in the soil and splintered railroad ties covered with drifted snow, and a new crew installed in the tower. They didn't loosen up until spring, when they finally realized whose tower it really was and allowed me to fish from the iron fire escape above the Hudson. I never told anyone about the scotch, and if despite the advent of
automatic equipment the tower is still there (in the early Fifties I used to see it from the Twentieth Century Limited on my way to and from Chicago), a bottle of seventy-year-old Glenlivet still sits behind the third board from the right in the wainscotting on the river side.

The new men in the tower were not too much different from their predecessors. They, too, brought magazines that by the standards of the day were brazenly pornographic.

"Kid, did you ever see bosoms?"

"No."

"Wanna see some?"

"Don't show him that, Newton, he's too young."

"I am not."

"The hell he's not. He wouldn't know what he was looking at."

"That's why I want to show him, so he will know."

"It's not right. You don't corrupt kids."

"I wanna see some b—" I said, and was cut off.

"You shut up. If you see bosoms, you'll tell your mama and she'll come down here and flatten us. I brought some pie. Go out on the fire escape and eat it."

As I ate blueberry pie on the fire escape I watched them, their eyes going in and out of focus as they studied every page of a magazine called
Firemen's Beauties.
I never saw it myself. They kept it in the center drawer of the desk, and to get to this drawer you would have had to move the huge girth of one of the switchmen as he sealed it shut by leaning against it while shouting into the two-piece telephone. They never sat back when talking on this instrument, but always strained forward, levitated over a green desk blotter like a hippopotamus floating above Ebbets Field.

As the night trains passed in early evening, bound for Montreal, Chicago, and points west, we looked with longing into the lighted windows where, we thought, we might see real life. The tower was consigned to perpetual dimness—only the burning embers in the trackboard and two fifteen-watt bulbs above the North and South schedules brought light to the room, so when the great trains flashed by, their compartments and dining cars bathed in a color that was a cross between buttercup and white, it was like watching a film with randomly arranged frames.

The things I saw in those snake-shaped magic lantern shows that moved sometimes at speeds of seventy-five miles an hour gave me my first really distorted view of the world, which is not to say in the least that what I perceived was not accurate, or that I have capitulated, for I have not. I persist, like almost everyone else, in trying to straighten things out, but I believe that the world is somewhat like a piece of paper: it can be folded only a fixed number of times, and then it refuses further adjustment. Cycles of history, in my view, consist of just this folding and unfolding, but with a kind of dance rhythm.

Before I knew the great city to the south, before I knew crime, or suffering, or death, thousands of brightly lit tableaux were pulled past my astonished eyes. I learned that many of these scenes would include a man and a woman in various states of undress grasping one another like wrestlers. This meant little to me, as the sequence was presented out of order, with the full set exemplified over a period of about two years, and with totally random stress on, say, ear kissing. More treasured was full frontal feminine nudity, something that occurred more often than one might initially expect, because at night the train windows became mirrors to those inside the fully lit compartments. But, still, it happened rarely. I would say ... about four times in all—once at 75, once at 60, once at 45, and once at, bless the
engineer, 5 miles an hour, and it was then that I learned not only what magnificent beauty the requirements of modesty had kept from my eyes, but also that even 5 miles an hour can be too fast.

Though forever reaching for pearls, many an irascible octopus flashed by me. Among the thousands of scenes that passed and vanished, I remember a tiny goatlike man with pince-nez looking over a pile of precious stones that had been emptied from a violin case onto a card table. He must have been some sort of jewel thief, but his technique is anyone's guess. I saw fat men in bowler hats doing victory dances. I saw an appendix being removed, I think. I saw a girl, creeping by at less than a mile an hour, stuck in the sweater she was trying to pull over her head. I had no idea at first what I was watching. She looked like a miniature elephant or rhinoceros bumping against the panels of the sleeping compartment. Then I realized what it was, and I wondered why her mother, who was reading a newspaper on the seat facing forward, didn't come to her aid, something immediately explained when, a turn on the wheel of the binoculars brought the mother's neck brace into focus. What a family.

Although the dining cars were often full and bustling, a lot of people ate in their rooms. People are shy, and some, apparently, could afford to pay for a sleeping compartment but not the Pullman food, so they brought picnics. I used to play a game in which I would read salamis like the hands of a clock. "It's twenty of..."I would say, as a salami went by pointing to West Virginia, and, then, perhaps several trains later, "
three,
" when a salami went by pointing to New Haven.

Sometimes we saw fights, or men beating women, though we also saw women beating men. Once, on a southbound from Chicago to New York, we saw two apes (I'm fairly sure they were apes) gazing at each other as if they were in love.

One summer evening we watched several cars pass slowly by, their windows partially open, with a musician in each compartment, each playing a different part of the same Beethoven piano concerto. It was either a symphony orchestra on tour or one of the greatest coincidences ever.

You can name almost anything in life—rabbis, acrobats, weeping women, greyhounds, accountants, bored children, loving apes, deathly ill Sicilians—and we saw it roll past. In this universe you could tell the time from the way salamis pointed, and sex was accomplished completely out of order, while the nude was still arrestingly beautiful, fully lit, at five or fifty miles per hour. Though I never could have known the exquisite 5 mph nude, and now she's either dead or a hundred and one, I saw her in all her grace for ten seconds, and have adored her ever since.

The real prizes, however, were the private cars. Some had grand pianos, marble kitchens, and bathtubs large enough to bathe an elephant. When these moving dachas appeared several times each day, you could see dinners served, meetings held, and tycoons working at huge desks and in burgundy-colored leather chairs the size of Italian automobiles.

The richness of interiors lit by electric lights or the glow of a fire was wonderful to behold not because of the decoration or pure color but because of what it suggested. It made me think of and long for real life, though real life was precisely what I had, even if I did not know that. I made a boy's mistake, common enough, of thinking that real life was knowing many things and many people, living dangerously in faraway places, crossing the sea, or starting a power company on the Columbia River, a steamship line in Bolivia. I used to wonder who were the tall and elegant women in the private cars, in magnificent attire that made them look like the heroic women on coins. Who were
they that knew so many sins and sat so quietly drinking wine the color of rubies? I knew they had once been little girls, like my classmates, as shy as fauns, beloved, in gondolier hats with long ribbons. What had happened to them in the private cars, and would it happen to me, or was it something that simply occurred as one grew gigantic like the tycoons who were so big that they had to ride around in their own railroad cars?

I knew enough when I was nine years old to apprehend merely from glancing in the windows of trains that, as a group, tycoons were devastatingly unhappy. This unhappiness radiated from their magnificent and expensive nests like the odor of cattle in stock cars. If the wind were blowing in the right direction and at the right speed you could smell a cattle train half an hour before it came through and long after it left. So with the tycoons, whose unhappiness advertised their presence almost as if by magic.

There were at least four hundred families of tycoon, perhaps many thousands, but we knew of only the very famous ones or those with a local connection. We knew their names the way children today know the names of film stars and baseball players, and therein lay the puzzle that confronted the one detective on the police force of the Town of Ossining, for the records of the evening trains had somehow disappeared from the stationmaster's office in Grand Central, from the dispatcher's headquarters, from Harmon, even from Chicago. For the evening of June 5th, 1914, the history of trains was a blank.

At about twenty of eight the two switchmen and I sat up straight. A single engine and one car came from the south along the freight tracks, unscheduled and unannounced except for the automatic lights on the train board. As it passed illicitly, the switchmen struggled to read the serial number on the locomotive, and were incensed that it seemed not to exist. I was free, however, to look at the car in tow, a private car with darkened windows and no lights. It seemed as if it were heading for the Harmon Yards for maintenance or a refit, but it wasn't at Harmon the next day and it could have gone all the way west, never stopping until it came to rest on a siding in the middle of nowhere in Montana, or in an orange grove in San Diego. Who knows?