Moon Palace (34 page)

Perhaps it was all for the best. By staying on the periphery, Barber could remain who he wanted to be. The small colleges were glad to have him, and because he was not only the fattest professor anyone had ever seen, but also the Man Who Wore Hats, he was mercifully exempt from the petty bickerings and intrigues that plague life in the provinces. Everything about him was so far-flung and extravagant, so flagrantly outside the norm, that no one dared to judge him. He would arrive in late summer, all dusty from his days on the road, towing a U-Haul behind his battered, exhaust-belching car. If any students were around, he would promptly hire them to unload his things, paying them an exorbitant price for their work and then treating them all to lunch. That always helped to set the tone. They would see his staggering collection of books, the innumerable hats, and the special writing table that had been built for him in Topeka—the Saint Thomas Aquinas desk, as he called it, with the large semicircle removed from the surface
to accommodate his belly. It was hard not to be fascinated: watching him move in that breathless, wheezing way of his, hefting his great bulk slowly from one place to another, continually smoking those long cigars that left ashes all over his clothes. The students made fun of him behind his back, but they were also devoted to him, and for these sons and daughters of farmers and shopkeepers and ministers, he was the closest they would ever come to knowing real brilliance. Inevitably, there were the coeds whose hearts throbbed for him (proving that the mind can indeed be more powerful than the body), but Barber had learned his lesson, and he never fell into that trap again. He secretly loved it when the young girls mooned around him, but he pretended not to understand, acting his part as scholarly curmudgeon, the jovial eunuch who had eaten his way past desire. It was a painful, solitary business, but it gave him a measure of protection, and if that didn’t always work, at least he had learned the importance of keeping the shades drawn and the door locked. In all the years of his wanderings, no one ever found fault with him. He overwhelmed them with his singularity, and before his colleagues had a chance to tire of him, he was already moving on to the next place, saying his farewells and vanishing into the sunset.

According to what Barber told me, he crossed paths with Uncle Victor once, but in thinking through the details of both their lives, I believe they may have seen each other as many as three times. The first encounter would have been in 1939, at the New York World’s Fair. I know for a fact that they both attended, and while the odds are heavily against it, it is certainly possible that they could have been there on the same day. I like to imagine them standing together in front of some exhibit—the Car of the Future, for example, or the Kitchen of Tomorrow—and then bumping into each other by accident and tipping their hats in simultaneous apology, two young men in the prime of life, one fat and the other thin, a phantom comedy team performing their little act for me in the projection room of my skull. Effing was also at the fair, of course, freshly returned from his years in Europe,
and there are times when I have placed him in that imaginary scene as well, sitting in an old-fashioned wicker buggy as Pavel Shum pushes him across the grounds. Perhaps Barber and Uncle Victor are standing next to each other when Effing passes by. Perhaps, at just that moment, Effing is shouting some foultempered insult at his Russian companion, and Barber and Uncle Victor, stunned by the man’s rudeness in public, smile at each other and sadly shake their heads. Little knowing, of course, that this man is the father of one of them and the future grandfather of the nephew of the other. The possibilities for such scenes are limitless, but I generally try to keep them as modest as I can—brief and silent interactions: a smile, a tip of the hat, a mumbled apology. They are more suggestive to me that way, as if by not daring too much, by concentrating on small, ephemeral details, I can trick myself into believing that these things truly happened.

The second encounter would have been in Cleveland, in 1946. This one is perhaps more conjectural than the first, but I distinctly remember walking through Lincoln Park in Chicago with my uncle one day and seeing a gigantic fat man eating a sandwich on the grass. This man reminded Victor of another fat man he had once seen in Cleveland (“back in the days when I was still with the orchestra“), and although I have no definite proof, I like to think that the man who made such an impression on him was Barber. If nothing else, the dates match up perfectly, since Victor played in Cleveland from 1945 to 1948, and Barber moved to the YMCA in the spring of 1946. As Victor told it, he was eating cheesecake one night in Lansky’s Delicatessen, a large, noisy emporium three blocks west of Severence Hall. The orchestra had just finished performing an all-Beethoven program, and he had gone there with three other members of the woodwind section for a late-night snack. From the seat he occupied at the rear of the restaurant, he had an unobstructed view of an obese man sitting alone at a table along the side partition. Unable to turn his eyes away from this enormous, solitary figure, my uncle watched in horror as the man worked his way through two bowls of matzoh ball soup, a platter
of stuffed cabbage, a side order of blintzes, three dishes of cole slaw, a basket of bread, and six or seven pickles speared from the bucket of brine. Victor was so awed by this display of gluttony that it stuck with him for the rest of his life, a portrait of pure and unadulterated human unhappiness. “Anyone who eats-like that is trying to kill himself,” he said to me. “It’s the same thing as watching a man starve to death.”

The last time they collided was in 1959, during the period when my uncle and I were living in Saint Paul, Minnesota. Barber was doing a stint at Macalester College then, and one evening as he sat in his apartment scanning the used car ads in the back pages of the
Pioneer Press
, his eyes happened to fall on an announcement for clarinet lessons given by one Victor Fogg, “formerly of the Cleveland Orchestra.” The name ripped through his memory like a lance, and an image of Emily came back to him, more vivid and fragrant than any image he had seen of her in years. She was suddenly inside him again, restored to life by the appearance of her name, and for the rest of that week he could not get her out of his thoughts, wondering what had happened to her, conjuring up the various lives she might have lived, seeing her with a clarity that almost shocked him. The music teacher was probably not related to her, but he didn’t see what harm it could do to find out. His first impulse was to call Victor on the phone, but then, after rehashing what he would say, he thought better of it. He didn’t want to sound like a fool when he tried to tell his story, stammering incoherences to a bored stranger on the other end of the line. He decided on a letter instead, drafting seven or eight versions before he was satisfied, and then mailed it off in a fit of anguish, regretting what he had done the instant the envelope disappeared into the box. The answer came ten days later, a tight-lipped scribble slanting across a sheet of yellow notepaper. “Sir—” the message read, “Emily Fogg was indeed my sister, but it is my sad duty to inform you that she died in a traffic accident eight months ago. Infinite regrets. Sincerely, Victor Fogg.”

When it came copy down to it, the letter did not tell him
anything he had not known before. Victor had divulged just one fact, and this fact was something Barber had learned for himself long ago: that he would never see Emily again. Death did not change this. It merely confirmed what was already a certainty, reiterated the same loss he had been living with for years. This did not make the letter any less painful to read, but once his crying stopped, he found himself hungering for more information. What had happened to her? Where had she gone and what had she done? Had she been married? Had she left behind any children? Had anyone loved her? Barber wanted facts. He wanted to fill in the blanks and construct a life for her, something tangible to carry around with him: a series of pictures, as it were, a photo album that he could open in his mind and study at will. He wrote back to Victor the next day. After expressing his heartfelt condolences and sorrow in the first paragraph, he went on to suggest, ever so delicately, how important it would be for him to know the answers to some of these questions. He waited patiently for a response, but two weeks went by without a word. At last, thinking his letter might have been lost, he called up Victor on the telephone. After three or four rings, an operator broke in and told him that the number had been disconnected. This was puzzling, but Barber did not let it daunt him (the man might have been poor, after all, too strapped to pay his phone bill), and so he climbed into his ‘51 Dodge and drove to Victor’s apartment house at 1025 Linwood Avenue. Unable to find Fogg’s name among the buzzers on the entranceway, he rang the janitor’s bell instead. Several moments later, a small man in a green and yellow sweater shuffled out to the door and told him that Mr. Fogg was gone. “Him and the little boy,” the man said, “they just picked up and left about ten days ago.” This was a disappointment to Barber, a blow he had not been expecting. But not for one heartbeat did he stop to consider who that little boy was. And even if he had, it would not have made any difference. He would have taken him for the clarinetist’s son and left it at that.

Years later, when Barber told me about the letter he had received from Victor, I finally understood why my uncle and I had left Saint Paul so suddenly back in 1959. The whole scene made sense to me now: the flurry of late-night packing, the nonstop drive back to Chicago, the two weeks of living in a hotel and not going to school. Victor could not have known the truth about Barber, but that did not make him any less afraid of what that truth might have been. A father was out there somewhere, and why take a chance on this man who was so curious to learn things about Emily? If worse came to worse, who was to say he wouldn’t fight for custody of the boy? It was simple enough to avoid mentioning me when he wrote back after the first letter, but then the second letter came with all those new questions, and Victor realized that he was trapped. Ignoring the letter would only postpone the problem, for if the stranger was as curious as he seemed to be, he would eventually come looking for us. What would happen then? Victor saw no choice but to abscond, to gather me up in the middle of the night and vanish in a cloud of smoke.

This story was one of the last things Barber told me, and it tore me apart to hear it. I understood what Victor had done, and seeing that devotion spelled out for me, I was caught in a surge of sentiment—aching with regret for my uncle, mourning his death all over again. But at the same time I also felt frustration, bitterness over the years that had been lost. For if Victor had answered Barber’s second letter instead of running away, I might have discovered who my father was as far back as 1959. No one was to blame for what happened, but that does not make it any less difficult to accept. It was all a matter of missed connections, bad timing, blundering in the dark. We were always in the copy place at the wrong time, the wrong place at the copy time, always just missing each other, always just a few inches from figuring the whole thing out. That’s what the story boils down to, I think. A series of lost chances. All the pieces were there from the beginning, but no one knew how to put them together.

N
one of this came out during that first meeting, of course. Once Barber decided not to talk about his suspicions, the only subject available to us was his father, and we covered that quite thoroughly during the days he spent in town. The first night, he took me to dinner at Gallagher’s on Fifty-second Street; the second night, we went out to a restaurant in Chinatown with Kitty; and the third day, Sunday, I joined him for breakfast at his hotel before he caught the plane back to Minnesota. Barber’s wit and charm soon made you forget his unfortunate appearance, and the more time I spent with him, the more comfortable I felt. We talked freely almost from the beginning, trading jokes and ideas as we told our stories to each other, and because he was not someone who was afraid of the truth, I was able to talk about his father without censoring myself, giving the whole story of my months with Effing, the good along with the bad.

As for Barber, he had never known much of anything. His father, they told him, had died out West a few months before he was born, and that seemed plausible enough, since the walls of the house were covered with paintings, and everyone had always said his father was a painter, a specialist in landscapes who had gone on many travels for his art. His last trip was to the deserts of Utah, they said, a godforsaken place if there ever was one, and that was where he had died. But the circumstances of that death were never made clear to him. When he was seven years old, an aunt told him that his father had fallen off a cliff. Three years later, an uncle explained that his father had been captured by Indians, and then, not six months after that, Molly Sharp announced that it had been the work of the devil. She was the cook who fed him all those delicious puddings after school—a florid, red-faced Irishwoman with large gaps between her teeth—and he had never known her to tell a lie. Whatever the cause, his father’s death was always given as the reason why his mother had taken to her room. That was how the family referred to his mother’s condition, although
the fact was that she sometimes left her room, especially on warm summer nights, when she would wander through the corridors of the house, or even walk down to the beach and sit by the water, listening to the small waves wash in from the Sound.