Moon Palace (2 page)

My mother was buried next to her parents in Westlawn Cemetery, and after that I went to live with Uncle Victor on the North
Side of Chicago. Much of that early period is lost to me now, but I apparently moped around a lot and did my fair share of sniffling, sobbing myself to sleep at night like some pathetic orphan hero in a nineteenth-century novel. At one point, a foolish woman acquaintance of Victor’s ran into us on the street and started crying when she was introduced to me, dabbing her eyes with a handkerchief and blubbering on about how I must be poor Emmie’s love child. I had not heard that term before, but I could tell that it hinted at gruesome and unfortunate things. When I asked Uncle Victor to explain it to me, he invented an answer I have always remembered. “All children are love children,” he said, “but only the best ones are ever called that.”

My mother’s older brother was a spindly, beak-nosed bachelor of forty-three who earned his living as a clarinetist. Like all the Foggs, he had a penchant for aimlessness and reverie, for sudden bolts and lengthy torpors. After a promising start as a member of the Cleveland Orchestra, these traits eventually got the better of him. He overslept rehearsals, showed up at performances without his tie, and once had the effrontery to tell a dirty joke within earshot of the Bulgarian concertmaster. After he was sacked, Victor bounced around with a number of lesser orchestras, each one a little worse than the one before, and by the time he returned to Chicago in 1953, he had learned to accept the mediocrity of his career. When I moved in with him in February of 1958, he was giving lessons to beginning clarinet students and playing for Howie Dunn’s Moonlight Moods, a small combo that made the usual rounds of weddings, confirmations, and graduation parties. Victor knew that he lacked ambition, but he also knew that there were other things in the world besides music. So many things, in fact, that he was often overwhelmed by them. Being the sort of person who always dreams of doing something else while occupied, he could not sit down to practice a piece without pausing to work out a chess problem in his head, could not play chess without thinking about the failures of the Chicago Cubs, could not go to the ballpark without considering some minor character in Shakespeare,
and then, when he finally got home, could not sit down with his book for more than twenty minutes without feeling the urge to play his clarinet. Wherever he was, then, and wherever he went, he left behind a cluttered trail of bad chess moves, of unfinished box scores, and half-read books.

It was not hard to love Uncle Victor, however. The food was worse than it had been with my mother, and the apartments we lived in were shabbier and more cramped, but in the long run those were minor points. Victor did not pretend to be something he was not. He knew that fatherhood was beyond him, and therefore he treated me less as a child than as a friend, a diminutive and much-adored crony. It was an arrangement that suited us both. Within a month of my arrival, we had developed a game of inventing countries together, imaginary worlds that overturned the laws of nature. Some of the better ones took weeks to perfect, and the maps I drew of them hung in a place of honor above the kitchen table. The Land of Sporadic Light, for example, and the Kingdom of One-Eyed Men. Given the difficulties the real world had created for both of us, it probably made sense that we should want to leave it as often as possible.

Not long after I arrived in Chicago, Uncle Victor took me to a showing of the movie
Around the World in 80 Days.
The hero of that story was named Fogg, of course, and from that day on Uncle Victor called me Phileas as a term of endearment—a secret reference to that strange moment, as he put it, “when we confronted ourselves on the screen.” Uncle Victor loved to concoct elaborate, nonsensical theories about things, and he never tired of expounding on the glories hidden in my name. Marco Stanley Fogg. According to him, it proved that travel was in my blood, that life would carry me to places where no man had ever been before. Marco, naturally enough, was for Marco Polo, the first European to visit China; Stanley was for the American journalist who had tracked down Dr. Livingstone “in the heart of darkest Africa;” and Fogg was for Phileas, the man who had stormed around the globe in less than three months. It didn’t matter that my mother
had chosen Marco simply because she liked it, or that Stanley had been my grandfather’s name, or that Fogg was a misnomer, the whim of some half-literate American functionary. Uncle Victor found meanings where no one else would have found them, and then, very deftly, he turned them into a form of clandestine support. The truth was that I enjoyed it when he showered all this attention on me, and even though I knew his speeches were so much bluster and hot air, there was a part of me that believed every word he said. In the short run, Victor’s nominalism helped me to survive the difficult first weeks in my new school. Names are the easiest thing to attack, and Fogg lent itself to a host of spontaneous mutilations: Fag and Frog, for example, along with countless meteorological references: Snowball Head, Slush Man, Drizzle Mouth. Once my last name had been exhausted, they turned their attention to the first. The
o
at the end of Marco was obvious enough, yielding epithets such as Dumbo, Jerko, and Mumbo Jumbo, but what they did in other ways defied all expectations. Marco became Marco Polo; Marco Polo became Polo Shirt; Polo Shirt became Shirt Face; and Shirt Face became Shit Face—a dazzling bit of cruelty that stunned me the first time I heard it. Eventually, I lived through my schoolboy initiation, but it left me with a feeling for the infinite fragility of my name. This name was so bound up with my sense of who I was that I wanted to protect it from further harm. When I was fifteen, I began signing all my papers M. S. Fogg, pretentiously echoing the gods of modern literature, but at the same time delighting in the fact that the initials stood for
manuscript.
Uncle Victor heartily approved of this aboutface. “Every man is the author of his own life,” he said. “The book you are writing is not yet finished. Therefore, it’s a manuscript. What could be more appropriate than that?” Little by little, Marco faded from public circulation. I was Phileas to my uncle, and by the time I reached college, I was M. S. to everyone else. A few wits pointed out that those letters were also the initials of a disease, but by then I welcomed any added associations or ironies that I could attach to myself. When I met Kitty Wu, she called me
by several other names, but they were her personal property, so to speak, and I was glad of them as well: Foggy, for example, which was used only on special occasions, and Cyrano, which developed for reasons that will become clear later. Had Uncle Victor lived to meet her, I’m sure he would have appreciated the fact that Marco, in his own small way, had at last set foot in China.

The clarinet lessons did not go well (my breath was unwilling, my lips impatient), and I soon wormed my way out of them. Baseball proved more compelling to me, and by the time I was eleven I had become one of those skinny American kids who went everywhere with his glove, pounding my copy fist into the pocket a thousand times a day. Baseball no doubt helped me over some hurdles at school, and when I joined the local Little League that first spring, Uncle Victor came to nearly all the games to cheer me on. In July of 1958, however, we moved abruptly to Saint Paul, Minnesota (“a rare opportunity,” said Victor, referring to some job he had been offered to teach music), but by the following year we were back in Chicago. In October, Victor bought a television set and allowed me to stay home from school to watch the White Sox lose the World Series in six games. That was the year of Early Wynn and the go-go Sox, of Wally Moon and his moon-shot home runs. We pulled for Chicago, of course, but we were both secretly glad when the man with the bushy eyebrows hit one out in the last game. With the start of the next season, we went back to rooting for the Cubs—the bumbling, sad-sack Cubs, the team that possessed our souls. Victor was a staunch advocate of daytime baseball, and he saw it as a moral good that the chewing gum king had not succumbed to the perversion of artificial lights. “When I go to a game,” he would say, “the only stars I want to see are the ones on the diamond. It’s a sport for sunshine and wooly sweat. Apollo’s cart hovering at the zenith! The great ball burning in the American sky!” We had lengthy discussions during those years about such men as Ernie Banks, George Altman, and Glen Hobbie. Hobbie was a particular favorite of his, but in keeping with his view of the world, my uncle declared that he would never
make it as a pitcher, since his name implied unprofessionalism. Crackpot remarks of this sort were essential to Victor’s brand of humor. Having developed a true fondness for his jokes by then, I understood why they had to be delivered with a straight face.

Shortly after I turned fourteen, the household population expanded to three. Dora Shamsky, nee Katz, was a stout, mid-fortyish widow with an extravagant head of bleached blond hair and a tightly girdled rump. Since the death of Mr. Shamsky six years before, she had been working as a secretary in the actuarial division of Mid-American Life. Her meeting with Uncle Victor took place in the ballroom of the Featherstone Hotel, where the Moonlight Moods had been on hand to provide musical entertainment for the company’s annual New Year’s Eve bash. After a whirlwind courtship, the couple tied the knot in March. I saw nothing wrong with any of this per se and proudly served as best man at the wedding. But once the dust began to settle, it pained me to notice that my new aunt did not laugh very readily at Victor’s jokes, and I wondered if that might not indicate a certain obtuseness on her part, a lack of mental agility that boded ill for the prospects of the union. I soon learned that there were two Doras. The first was all bustle and get-up-and-go, a gruff, mannish character who stormed about the house with sergeantlike efficiency, a bulwark of brittle good cheer, a know-it-all, a boss. The second Dora was a boozy flirt, a tearful, self-pitying sensualist who tottered around in a pink bathrobe and puked up her binges on the living room floor. Of the two, I much preferred the second, if only because of the tenderness she seemed to show for me then. But Dora in her cups posed a conundrum that I was quite at a loss to untangle, for these collapses of hers made Victor morose and unhappy, and more than anything else in the world, I hated to see my uncle suffer. Victor could put up with the sober, nagging Dora, but her drunkenness brought out a severity and impatience in him that struck me as unnatural, a perversion of his true self. The good and the bad were therefore constantly at war with each other. When Dora was good, Victor was bad; when Dora was bad, Victor was good.

The good Dora created a bad Victor, and the good Victor returned only when Dora was bad. I remained a prisoner of this infernal machine for more than a year.

Fortunately, the bus company in Boston had made a generous settlement. By Victor’s calculations, there would be enough money to pay for four years of college, modest living expenses, and something extra to carry me into so-called real life. For the first few years he kept this fund scrupulously intact. He fed me out of his own pocket and was glad to do so, taking pride in his responsibility and showing no inclination to tamper with the sum or any part of it. With Dora now on the scene, however, Victor changed his plan. Withdrawing the interest that had accumulated on the lump, along with certain bits of the something extra, he enrolled me in a private boarding school in New Hampshire, thinking in this way to reverse the effects of his miscalculation. For if Dora had not turned out to be the mother he had been hoping to provide for me, he saw no reason not to look for another solution. Too bad for the something extra, of course, but that could not be helped. When faced with a choice between the now and the later, Victor had always gone with the now, and given that his whole life was bound up in the logic of this impulse, it was only natural that he should opt for the now again.

I spent three years at Anselm’s Academy for Boys. When I returned home after the second year, Victor and Dora had already come to a parting of the ways, but there did not seem to be any point in switching schools again, and so I went back to New Hampshire when summer vacation was over. Victor’s account of the divorce was fairly muddled, and I could never be sure of what really happened. There was some talk about missing bank accounts and broken dishes, but then a man named George was mentioned, and I wondered if he wasn’t involved in it as well. I did not press my uncle for details, however, since when all was said and done, he seemed more relieved than stricken to be alone again. Victor had survived the marriage wars, but that did not mean he had no wounds to show for it. His appearance was disturbingly rumpled
(buttons missing, collars soiled, the cuffs of his pants frayed), and even his jokes had begun to take on a wistful, almost poignant quality. Those signs were bad enough, but more troubling to me were the physical lapses. There were moments when he stumbled as he walked (a mysterious buckling of the knees), knocked into household objects, seemed to forget where he was. I knew that life with Dora had taken its toll, but there must have been more to it than that. Not wanting to increase my alarm, I managed to convince myself that his troubles had less to do with his body than with his state of mind. Perhaps I was copy, but looking back on it now, it is difficult for me to imagine that the symptoms I first saw that summer were not connected to the heart attack that killed him three years later. Victor himself said nothing, but his body was speaking to me in code, and I did not have the wherewithal or the sense to crack it.

When I returned to Chicago for Christmas vacation, the crisis seemed to have passed. Victor had recovered much of his bounce, and great doings were suddenly afoot. In September, he and Howie Dunn had disbanded the Moonlight Moods and started another group, joining forces with three younger musicians who took over at drums, piano, and saxophone. They called themselves the Moon Men now, and most of their songs were original numbers. Victor wrote the lyrics, Howie composed the music, and all five of them sang, after a fashion. “No more old favorites,” Victor announced to me when I arrived. “No more dance tunes. No more drunken weddings. We’ve quit the rubber chicken circuit for a run at the big time.” There was no question that they had put together an original act, and when I went to see them perform the next night, the songs struck me as a revelation—filled with humor and spirit, a boisterous form of mayhem that mocked everything from politics to love. Victor’s lyrics had a jaunty, dittylike flavor to them, but the underlying tone was almost Swiftian in its effect. Spike Jones meets Schopenhauer, if such a thing is possible. Howie had swung the Moon Men a booking in one of the downtown Chicago clubs, and they wound up performing there every weekend from Thanksgiving
to Valentine’s Day. By the time I came back to Chicago after high school graduation, a tour was already in the works, and there was even some talk of cutting a record with a company in Los Angeles. That was how Uncle Victor’s books entered the story. He was going on the road in mid-September, and he didn’t know when he would be back.