New Moon (38 page)

I was mortified by the Jewish lawyer and the coach, but Uncle Paul kept insisting that getting into these schools was a matter of connections. “This is America,” he said, “not communist Russia.”

“What about merit?”

“Lots of people have good grades. That doesn’t mean they get accepted.”

I wasn’t an informed shopper either. I was chasing scenery and a mood more than curriculum. My unequivocal first choice was Swarthmore, in the suburbs of Philadelphia. When I visited the campus myself by train, I felt as though I had found Blueland, long rows of trees and a small-village feeling. It was also the bohemian summer camp I had never been allowed to attend. I was hell-bent to apply and made it my first choice, but Mr. Gucker, Horace Mann’s Director of College Admissions, put on the brakes. He asked me to fill out the form for early decision at Amherst.

“Why? I’d rather just try Swarthmore.”

“Swarthmore is a second-rate school. You should at least apply to the best college you can get into. That way everyone ends up where they belong.”

So I did the paperwork, and on my seventeenth birthday I received an epistle with a dean’s inked signature, congratulating me on my acceptance. “What should I do now?” I asked Mr. Gucker the next day.

He had received a carbon, so had a ready answer. “Write a letter to Dean Wilson thanking him and say you look forward to attending in the fall.”

“But what about Swarthmore? I haven’t even applied.”

“Now you don’t need to.”

Everyone thought it was so great I got into Amherst that I allowed myself to feel good about it too. After all, it was a cool place to go. I imagined autumn meadows, New England farmhouses, wise girls at nearby Smith and Mount Holyoke.

Dr. Friend observed the whole process without comment. “I wanted to see what you would do,” he remarked afterwards. “I assumed you would pick Columbia because I didn’t think you were in any shape to leave treatment. But you never even considered that or consulted me. You never considered that applying to Amherst
was
termination. I finally decided that getting you away from your mother was more valuable than any service I could provide.”

The Yankees held first place, and Maris kept hitting homers so that on October 2nd he had 60—he had caught Babe Ruth.

I put on my powder-blue shirt and a sports jacket and took the subway downtown to Jill’s. She was waiting casually by the awning and approached me with her winsome Kenwood smile: “So we meet again, Yankee fan.”

The October game, though meaningless in the standings, had a World Series flavor because of Maris, and we talked baseball and stats all the way to the Bronx as crowds increased stop by stop.

Jill was a dazzling blend of antitheses—a pretty girl and baseball. Those dual energies stirred different parts of me, bumping into each other without ever quite meeting. Eros and ERAs were radiating from a tall Keith-like girl with an almost jock swagger, spouting effortless baseball lingo. Pure oxymoron. Should I treat her like my baseball crony Jake or like seductress Karen? That was the easy part: after all, I could take turns and experiment, mix and match. The harder part was knowing whether to feel the self that hung out with baseball buddies, little at stake, or to feel the unabridged charge of an attractive girl. There too I vacillated, dipping in and out of energy fields.

I had sat in Eddie Fisher’s box with schoolmates dozens of times; yet it was as though I had never been there before. Even Mr. Glazer kept his distance, as Jill and I chatted about Kenmont and classwork—she went to an all-girls’ private school downtown. She had
nothing good to say about Asher except that he was cute. “He’s not someone I’ll be seeing anymore.” And then, mid-game, Maris came to the plate, took a ball, cleared his spikes with his bat, adjusted his uniform, took another pitch. Tracy Stallard threw again, Maris swung, and the ball sailed in a rising arc down the right-field line. As the Stadium recognized the moment, it erupted in a roar. Jill threw her arms around me, as we hugged and cheered.

In the digital era I have searched numerous videos of that moment without finding even a blur of fans and faces where we sat. Maris pulled the pitch to right and then set out toward first-base in his moment of triumph, yet at a pace and posture that showed respect and homage to the baseball gods. The camera tracked him on his circle of the bases, but the 109 seconds either follows him into a crowd of his welcoming teammates at the plate and then entering the home dugout or terminates its pan a fraction of a second before reaching our section behind the visitors’ dugout. Even in a time machine I could not go back to our first date.

Jill became a faithful phone-and-letter friend after that. We wrote and called crosstown about baseball and literature. She rooted for the Reds to beat the hated American Leaguers in the Series. When the Yankees won, she sent what she called “a humble note of congratulations.”

I invited her to another high-profile event—a sold-out concert by the Limeliters at Carnegie Hall for which I got tickets through Grossinger’s. Wry philosophical Lou Gottlieb, high-tenored Glenn Yarbrough (years later the voice of
“Baby the rain must fall
 … ), and polyglot banjo fiend Alex Hassilev were my new enthusiasm; I had been trying to interest my friends in their songs all fall without success.

That night they belted out a repertoire from “There’s a Party Here Tonight” and “When I First Came to This Land” to “The Rising of the Moon” and “Morningtown Ride,” an occasional Spanish or Russian ballad and novelty song thrown in. Afterwards Jill called them “an intellectual blend of the Clancy Brothers and Kingston Trio”; she wasn’t going to let me know whether she approved, she was withholding judgment. We found a coffee shop and talked for two hours about the matter and Ibsen whom we were coincidentally
both reading in school.

Soon I realized I didn’t have to dredge up big events; I could just ask Jill out. We went to
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
at a theater on Lexington and then Ibsen’s
Ghosts
on a small Greenwich Village stage. Every other week we checked the movie and theater sections and made our selection, conferring by phone as Saturday approached. Each time I would take the subway to her apartment, and from there we would hail a cab. After the performance we would have dessert at a restaurant and sit around talking about what we had seen. She considered herself an accomplished literary critic and thought I was undisciplined and far too psychological, so she challenged me on just about every symbol or interpretation I offered.

Sometimes we went back to her apartment and continued our discussion in the living room. If her mother was up she joined in. The three of us jabbered away for an hour or more. Then I came home late on the subway and let myself in the back door.

The early darkness of the Solstice approached from a direction I had never known. City lights danced, and I was nearly happy. The song from the movie carried the ambiance of my life:
“Moon river, wider than a mile, / I’m crossing you in style, someday …”

Yes, she had been a “moon” figure from the first day I saw her with Asher. Even our initial point of contact was an outfielder named Moon.

In the shower I sang at the top of my lungs, trying to capture the precise resonance. Occasionally Bridey joined in from the hallway, trying to steer me back into tune:
“ … my huckleberry friend…. ”

I remember Jill as Audrey Hepburn in the movie, curled on the living room sofa, blowing smoke in the air, conscious of each self-conscious motion she made. Part of me would be talking to her, and part of me would be looking at the remarkable girl: her face, her eyes, the curve of her breasts, her lips, her clothes, her pocketbook, her smooth legs, her fancy gestures, her womanly movements.

I could never forget what Asher said, though I detested him for it because Jill had become my best friend and his words were always in the way, goading me, telling me I somehow wasn’t as attractive or special as he was. His description was a maddening
abstraction without connection to my own experience. Once, though, I took Jill’s hand in mine while we were walking. At first it felt ridiculous, too silly even to believe, but when she pressed my hand back I felt as though I held her entirely and was held by her as we walked along.

When I talked to subway friends, they were full of notions as to how to get started, but it was always the same advice adding up to nothing: “You know from that guy Asher she gives, so what are you waiting for?” They seemed concerned that I not lose my “big chance.” Such was teen world 1961—lingo and posturing, urban prep school notwithstanding.

One December Friday on getting home from school, I felt particularly gloomy and called my huckleberry friend. We had been out the past Saturday, so it was too soon to see each other again by our established pacing, but I wanted to hear her voice and took a chance. When I asked her how she was, she moaned, “Dreary Friday.” I was delighted—a soulmate. “Yes,” she said, “we should by all means go to the movies tomorrow night.”

All the next day I hung around the apartment doing homework distractedly, wishing I felt easy about her. I had become obsessed with what it would be like to kiss Jill. I imagined lying on top of her and making out, her long elegant frame moving with mine, her eyes, as ever, teasing, bewitching.

As often as I forced myself to squash the daydream, to render more lines of Virgil, I came unfailingly back to its reverie. My entire being balked at Latin conundrums. It wasn’t just that Jill combined all the fantasies I had ever had; it was that she was enough of a buddy I could imagine them coming true.

After the movie what had never happened happened as I had imagined it might. On her lead we went into her room instead of the living room. I sat in a chair, and she stretched out on the bed, back against the wall. I heard my hollow voice talking while my imagination was exploding. She was so exciting, smooth blouse over her breasts, thick teased red hair, adroit curl of her voice, alluring and friendly both. I tracked the growing lateness of the hour, getting later each time I glanced. In my mind all of time was
draining away. I was numb with feeling; I didn’t know what to do.

She began to show signs of getting up. I moved toward her, stood there. “What?” she said.

How could she not know? I made a gesture toward a simple kiss. She took a step back, looked at me bewildered, then said, “No.”

“Why?”

“Because it would ruin everything.”

Later—though in years—I thought that perhaps she was telling me it had always ruined everything, that she wanted this to be different. But I was raw and wild then, and I couldn’t bear the thought of Asher being allowed so easily, me not at all. That night when I left her I ran ten blocks down Fifth Avenue against a whipping wind, over and over screaming Emerson’s lines in my mind:

“I am the doubter and the doubt, / and I the hymn the Brahmin sings.”

… ran past buildings and storefronts until I reached apotheosis in myself, and exhaustion.

I never called Jill again.

Senior year brought its own privileges. We sat in our fabled lounge and watched
Amos ’n’ Andy
and
Bullwinkle Moose
during first-period study hall.

Tim Moore playing sly George “Kingfish” Stevens with Ernestine Wade as his fiery wife Sapphire Stevens hadn’t been booted off the air by the NAACP yet, so we got to appreciate African American comedy at its fifties finest. Usually Andy Brown (played by Spencer Williams) came into some unexpected scratch, so Kingfish busied himself with schemes for how to relieve him of it. For instance on one occasion he sold Andy a cut-rate tour of the world—passengers had to travel blindfolded. As they strolled through Central Park, Kingfish announced, “Ah, I see the famous obelisk of Egypt.” When Andy wanted to take the blindfold off and look, Kingfish resorted to, “Ah, but I’m afraid that’s the more expensive tour and youse can’t afford it, son.”

In my favorite episode Kingfish decided to sell the newly affluent Andy a property, but the particular real estate hoisted on his unsuspecting friend was actually a piece of cardboard deployed on an empty lot, a photograph of a house with a cutout door on it. I don’t remember what gullibility led Andy to fall for such an overt deception, but he made the purchase. He then brought dim-witted Lightning to view his new domicile. The trouble was, whenever they tried the front door, they ended up in the backyard. After a number of such forays, Lightning was finally inspired to investigate
further. Circumambulating the structure, he declared, “That’s one mighty thin house there, Andy.”

These guys were everything Horace Mann wasn’t, and we loved them for it.

From a closet at home I rescued a hockey game with a marble and tin men, which Jonny and I played addictively for years before abandoning, and donated it to the lounge. Tournaments ran continuously thereafter alongside the TV. Then we voted to spend class funds on a new model with moving men in tracks and a wooden puck.

But our teachers were not going to allow a year in the tank. Mr. Clinton, whom I now had for the second time, intended his Modern European history course to be the tour de force of our Horace Mann education. Over six feet tall with a mop of white hair and the fierce countenance of Samuel Johnson, he spent weeks filling us with an appreciation for the Church and the complexities of feudalism. Inflamed by the decay of worldly things, he would bring famous lives to an end always with the same declaration: “Death, as it must to all men, came to Charlemagne, Charles the Great…. ” Death later came to Ferdinand and Isaebella, Cabot and Magellan, and Philip of Spain, even Martin Luther the reformer. After that we were submerged in the details of the Thirty Years War so graphically that I imagined Gustavus Adolphus riding out of the woods behind Van Cortlandt Park, leading a Swedish army, his minister Oxenstierna at his side.

We spent weeks on Erasmus and the northern Renaissance and then studied Jacob Burckhardt on the Medicis and sixteenth-century humanism in Italy. For Clinton, the Church was the single great institution of humanity—ameliorating and yet corrupting, simplistic and violent in its politics but profound in its ceremony. He enacted his Mediaeval passion so convincingly in class that Bob Alpert dropped left-wing politics and, to the horror of his parents, denounced their synagogue and began attending Mass.

There was a cult around Clinton. Rumors about his past ran the gamut from priesthood to Satanism to student seduction. Whatever the truth, he commanded our attention. I remember how, after attending the funeral of an ex-student who had died young,
he spent much of the next class describing the corpse in the open casket. “The difference between life and death is infinitesimal,” he preached. “He was strong, strapping, handsome, a youth, lying there, but he had already entered the country from whose bourne—Shakespeare—no traveller returns.” And then he wept openly before us, took out his handkerchief and sat silently sobbing at his desk for the remainder of class.

Another eccentric arrived during my junior year. Berman was a strange-looking man, almost like a mutant: totally bald though young; flat, thin eyes with an impenetrably morose expression behind black-rimmed glasses. He ate with us in the student rather than faculty dining room where he conducted sessions on the mystic Meister Eckhart and the Russian occult philosopher G. I. Gurdjieff. Chuck Stein told me Berman was a member of an ancient Rosicrucian order.

It was through Chuck rather than Berman that I became involved in the occult. Since many of my classmate’s poems were based on tarot cards, Mr. Ervin suggested that he bring a deck to class. Bright-hued vistas of “The Magician,” “The Wheel of Fortune,” and “The Hanged Man” were set on the table before us. Packed with symbols, the images were at once baseball cards, commercial ads, and illustrations from
Grimms’ Fairytales.

Chuck interpreted their gestalts to the creative-writing gang: “The wild red roses are our five senses.” He held a palm over the Magician’s garden. “You can feel their energy coming out of this card.” As we each gave it a playful pass, the red and yellow surface did seem unduly hot. “The Wheel of Fortune is the Galaxy pivoting in seasons and cosmic epochs.” He rotated it clockwise in midair, turning its Hebrew letters into a brief dreidel; then he set it down and picked up another. “The scaffold is the scaffold of Creation—the Hanged Man is really right-side up; he just seems upside-down from our limited perspective.”

My favorites were “The Star” and “The Moon,” two extraterrestrial landscapes with creatures emerging from the same pool of cosmic vibrations. Their murals featured an elemental crayfish, a pelican on a bare tree, an angel pouring water from earthen jugs,
and a sky bursting with yellow and white suns. The forces portrayed here, Chuck declared, were greater than cosmic rays from all the visible and invisible stars of the universe.

I wanted to learn more, so my friend led me downtown. I was flabbergasted that the beautiful Spanish-looking girl who had ridden the subway silently with us for years greeted Chuck with a bear hug at 242nd Street. Her name was Julie Garfield and she went to Buck’s Rock. Chuck lived in Yonkers, so this juxtaposition had not previously occurred.

We travelled Broadway all the way to Dr. Fabian’s old neighborhood near 14th Street. There Chuck turned into a used bookstore. Its downstairs, heralded by an overhead sign, was our destination: “Basement of the Occult.” There owner Donald Weiser removed hand-engraved tarots from locked glass and showed us arcane landscapes in enormous luminescent decks. Then he talked of alchemy, reincarnation, UFOs, and the coming revival of the hermetic arts.

The first item I bought was the Waite deck drawn by Pamela Colman Smith, the same set of seventy-eight cards that Chuck used. The second was a book,
The Tarot
by Paul Foster Case. When I read Case’s descriptions that night I felt as though I was ascending through Robert Penn Warren’s mere placeholder symbol into the fountain of souls itself:

“In contrast to the Magician, who stands upright in a garden, the High Priestess is seated within the precincts of a temple. The walls of the building are blue, and so are the vestments of this virgin priestess. Blue, the color assigned to the Moon, and to the element water, represents the primary root-substance, the cosmic mind-stuff…. ”

I stared at this woman in her robes of gossamer indigo. She was seated between twin pillars, an arras of unopened pomegranates behind her. I thought: “She is unconsciousness; she represents all that is hidden inside me.” What Dr. Fabian had once alluded to now had a Torah-like representation; it was still invisible, but I could hold a scrap of it in my hand. Believing that all-out panics were in my past, I was ready to become a pilgrim, to go on the quest that he had posed on my thirteenth birthday.

A week later I bought a second book, Arthur Edward Waite’s
Pictorial Key to the Tarot,
mainly for its appendix on fortune-telling. At home I set the cards on the rug and used Waite’s Celtic Cross formula to read my first draws—for Jonny, then Bridey, who was initially concerned that fortune cards might not be an appropriate activity for a Catholic but finally couldn’t resist. Years later, she told my sister that my use of the deck proved I was in league with the Devil.

My mother would have no part of it—she hated me in this guise—meteorologist, Hiroshima critic, tarot maven; it was all the same to her. But Bob accepted a reading and complimented me on my pizzazz: “I’m not sure you’re a fortune teller, or that there
are
such things, but you’ve got a fine sense of theater.”

At Waite’s direction I picked a Significator card to represent the person whose fortune was about to be told. Then Bridey or Jon shuffled the remaining cards while pondering an issue in his or her life. After being satisfied that the deck “got” it—my instruction—she or he handed it back to me. I took cards off the top in order.

In Bridey’s case I first made the stern, unsentimental Queen of Swords her Signifactor, then covered it with the top card from her sort, showing the major influences over her, then topped that card with another showing what crossed or opposed her. At the Significator’s crown the third card off the shuffle revealed what she hoped for as well as the best that could be achieved under the circumstances. Below the Significator I set the fourth, the foundation of the matter, showing (again, according to Waite) what had already passed into actuality. The fifth card, placed behind the direction from which the Queen was facing, disclosed what had recently passed and was fading. The sixth card, in the direction of the Queen’s clairvoyant gaze, foretold what was coming into being and would shape the future. Then the seventh through tenth positions were taken from the top of the remaining deck and placed in a vertical row apart, indicating respectively the person herself, the tendencies at work in her environment and among family and friends, her unconscious hopes and fears regarding the matter, and—the tenth card—the outcome, the culmination of the influences of all the cards, drawn
and undrawn.

When I brought the tarot to Grossinger’s at Christmas, Aunt Bunny was so taken with her reading that the next afternoon she invited a group of her friends from town for tea and fortunes. I picked female Significators and read the Celtic Cross for four dressed-to-the-nines ladies. Amazingly they wanted this and had patience to see it through; in fact, they were instant zealots, swayed somehow by the combination of esoteric images, forbidden knowledge, and my patter of gypsy put-on. The issues they brought were nontrivial: domestic, romantic, and financial quandaries, confessing them in surprising detail and listening attentively in a way that they would not have otherwise. Without the cards these bourgeois matrons wouldn’t have given me the time of day.

Despite the fact that I kept explaining they weren’t supposed to tell me
anything,
that the cards were larger than their stories, and blind, to boot—still, they laid it on the line: wayward husbands, risky stock portfolios, intrusive relatives, troubled children. They believed in this stuff more than I did, so I became their cosmic ventriloquist.

Amid tabletop jumbles of kings, queens, knights, pages, pentacles, swords, cups, wands, and major trumps, I converted shuffles to imaginative narratives. Using Waite’s and Case’s thumbnail glosses, I found perfidy, felicity, adversity, riches, impediment, and allies. I evoked secret quarrels (the Seven of Swords), having rejected three things and awaiting a fourth (the Four of Cups), and loss of one identity before taking on another (Death). My favorites were the Five of Pentacles (mendicants in rags on crutches, hobbling in the snow with a stained-glass window shining above them) and the Six of Cups (children sniffing the flowers of memory). For the former I reminded my subject of her potential for happiness and salvation while she wallowed in self-imposed exile. For the latter I warned of the deadly attraction of eternal return, of living too nostalgically in the past.

I knew never to predict actual things (“abuse of the deck,” Chuck had told me), even for the Ten of Swords, where the guy lies on the battlefield with ten huge blades piercing his body from head to thighs (bringing an unhappy gasp from Connie, who
drew it). I spoke like Dr. Fabian, only of difficulties that could be overcome through insight and knowledge.

“You should charge for this,” Marcia said.

“I can’t,” I told her. “I’d lose the power.”

At the time, I regarded it as a game, my readings a mixture of
The Interpretation of Dreams,
Waite, Case, and dead-reckoning. I thought I was popular and got so many repeat requests because I was a writer as well as a symbol maven—and that the women were charmed by getting their fortunes told by a kid.

Perhaps—but there are actually always two levels of divination and it is hard to know where one ends and the other begins. You tell the story literally in the cards and play honest broker, and you tell
another
story that you are getting from elsewhere. It is not that it is
not
in the cards but, even if it is, you are not getting it from them in the same way. Yet paradoxically you are
only
reading it from them—they fall into place as you go.

That
is what I was doing unconsciously—only I didn’t take it seriously. I didn’t grasp any of it then, had no context to grasp it. A natural empath, I mirrored my subjects even as I had mirrored my mother from day one. For Aunt Bunny’s friends it was a passing idyll; for Martha Towers it was a horrific visitation—and by a whelp out of her own flesh. I didn’t merely reflect her panics, I reflected what she was terrified of.

As an ingénue tarot reader, I was sought not because I was entertaining but because I gave
accurate information despite myself.
And that’s
why
I was entertaining.

Decades later some of these women were still telling me that I had foreshadowed major events in their lives (like Freddie Rosenberg leaving Marcia for another woman). You could lay down a hundred draws without getting ones as on target as those that appeared magically in 1961. It was effortless for me to weave such draws into compelling narratives.