The Fortress of Solitude (4 page)

The man on the ladder gathered excess with his blade and allowed it to drip heavily to the butcher paper on the parlor floor, which crackled as it accepted the weight.

The boy’s intensity, his gaze, might be wearing the gloss off her old photographs. He hadn’t turned a page for a whole minute. He remained curled around the album as Isabel was curled involuntarily around her whole self.

Isabel saw that Rachel Ebdus watched the plasterer. “The old art lives in him,” she told the younger woman. “He drinks beer on his breaks and talks like John Garfield, but look at the ceiling.”

“It’s beautiful.”

“He says his father taught him. He’s only bringing out the beauty which was hiding. He’s an instrument of the ceiling. He doesn’t need to understand.”

Isabel felt irritation with herself or Rachel Ebdus, she wasn’t sure which. She hadn’t brought the image entirely into the light: that though mute, the house conveyed a language of itself, as the plasterer carried forward his father’s trade.

“He’s got a great ass,” said Rachel.

Outside, the squirrel shrieked.

Isabel sighed. She actually craved one of the woman’s cigarettes. Was it possible to begin smoking at seventy-three? Isabel thought she might like to try. Or perhaps she was only impatient with her own inability to fathom anything about Rachel Ebdus besides the woman’s insatiability. And the cigarettes lay on the ironwork grille of Isabel’s patio table within a hand’s reach, whereas the plasterer’s ass was in every sense less accessible.

“If it’s in any way a question of money—” Isabel began, surprising herself by getting to the point.

“No, it isn’t,” said Rachel Ebdus, smiling.

“I don’t want to embarrass you. Both Packer and the Friends School have scholarship possibilities. I don’t know about Saint Ann’s. But I would also be glad to help.”

“It isn’t about money. I believe in public school. I went to public school.”

“That’s idealistic indeed. I do think you’ll find that all his friends will be at one or another of the private schools.”

“Dylan has friends on the block. I doubt they’re going to Brooklyn Friends or Packer.”

Days were not always like this. There were days like white pages, when no squirrels screamed in the trees and no boys leafed through her albums and no plasterer sweated at her ceiling and a neighbor stinking of radicalism and a tenuous marriage did not sit grinding cigarettes into Isabel’s china teacups and enjoying the ginger ale Isabel could no longer taste while offering as conversational checkmate a neat implication of racism, days when the only dischord in the tall Dutch house was the orange cat clawing newspaper bundles in the basement apartment into frayed, piss-smelling bales, days when Isabel sat upstairs at her table, scraping the nib of her pen across the signature line of a check to some moderately worthy cause, or to her favorite and completely unworthy one, her nephew Croft who’d hidden himself at a commune in Bloomington, Indiana, after impregnating a black cook at the house in Silver Bay and who, she’d been assured, divided Isabel’s monthly donation neatly in half, sending one portion to the distant cook and her child and donating the other to the commune’s petty-cash reserves for food and marijuana. To hell with Rachel Ebdus. Isabel subsidized feral hippies and the mulatto offspring of her criminal relations and Rachel Ebdus could certainly send Dylan, God help him, to Public School 38 to show his sole white face among that ocean of brown, to air his waterfall of girlish hair among the Afros, if that was what suited her principles. Isabel could wish now for this day to be unsquirreled entirely, for it to be one spent not even at her desk but rather one in which she lay in bed still, ignoring the orange cat’s cries, rereading Maugham or De Maupassant.

She wondered if Rachel Ebdus would also have admired Croft’s ass. Likely so.

The boy put the big photo album on the cast-iron patio table and pointed. “That’s your name,” he said inquiringly. Isabel turned, surprised.

The long-ago photographer had in the darkroom burned a row of small white letters at the bottom corner of each of the black-and-white shots of the boats, the harbor, the parties on the lawn:
VENDLE
’
S HARD
,
SILVER BAY
,
LAKE GEORGE
,
NY
. The boy pressed his nubby fingertip to Isabel’s family name, and waited for an answer.

Vendle’s Hard. Cranberries soaked in cognac. Emptied bottles rolling in the belly of a skiff. The famous oar, fouled in aquatic vines, that shattered and speared her side, puncturing her lung nearly to the spine. The old injury around which she was so rigidly curled.

“He reads,” said Isabel, allowing herself to be mildly impressed.

“Mmmmh hmm,” said Rachel Ebdus, humming the syllables through the ignition of another cigarette. “He sure does. He reads Abraham’s
New York Times
.”

“He’ll be with children who’ll never learn,” said Isabel, feeling impulsive and a little cruel. The fact was undeniable. Let Rachel squirm now.

“Maybe he’ll teach them,” Dylan’s mother said easily, then laughed. “It’s a problem for him to solve, school. I did it, so can he.” Cigarette between her fingers pointed to the sky and leaking smoke, she put her hand in Dylan’s hair.

chapter  
2

S
kully did exist. It was a science more closely related to the Spirograph and the Etch A Sketch than to the spaldeen and Dylan fell on it with gratitude. In fact when it was actually played he lost the game more often than he won but skully was an art that involved the conveyance of a body of knowledge, like the methods of a guild, and by his second summer on the block Dylan had mastered all its peripheral notions and was widely recognized for this mastery. For instance drawing the skully board. The first step involved finding the ideal square of slate and so Dylan’s long communion with the Dean Street sidewalk was rewarded. The slate shouldn’t be flawed by a crack or vein, or tilted, or bowed. Dylan favored a square in front of the blue-painted brownstone, midway between the home of the woman his mother sometimes, laughingly, called
Vendlemachine
and Henry called
the olelady,
and Henry’s own house. It was Dylan’s secret that other squares of slate farther down the block were as good or better but that he preferred this one for being nearer his own house and close also to Henry’s, where the kids gathered, and for the way it was shaded by a particular tree—the dynamics of space and sound, the quality of privacy and access, for a whole series of subtle aesthetical distinctions and that he could still hear his mother if she called for him from the stoop of their house—it would have been impossible to express all that went into his selection and so Dylan instead declared it the best square for skully, on the whole. And he was believed. The kids might scratch a skully board into another square from time to time, testing the principle, but after Dylan’s declaration the principle was in place.

Then the chalking of the skully board on the slate. Dylan could draw, though he came to understand this only by the inability of the others to match him. They’d drop their chalk at the sight of his skully boards, and he’d be enlisted by Marilla to draw hopscotch diagrams for the girls who’d otherwise scoffed at his shoes and pants—he wore what they called
roachsteppers
and
highwaters
. His skully boards were straight and clean, the four corners numbered elegantly, one, two, three, four, the winner’s zone in the center embellished with a double circle, his own innovation. This, like his choice of slate, became institutional, so much that one day Lonnie and Marilla scoffingly insisted it had always been done that way, and Dylan’s authorship of the double-ringed winner’s circle was permanently obscured.

Other innovations were resisted outright. Dylan one day designed a star-shaped skully board, where players would be expected to shoot their caps from triangular corners into center stage, as in Chinese checkers, a game which Dylan had been taught in his kindergarten class. Nobody understood, nobody played—it wasn’t skully. Dylan wiped the board away but the six heavily chalked points of the star remained etched lightly on the slate to haunt him until the next hard rain.

Then there was the making of the skully caps. Metal bottle tops from soda or beer were the standard, and the slightly heavier tops lined with cork were best, though from time to time a kid would experiment with a plastic cap, or a wide metal one from some other type of jar or bottle, ketchup, even pickles or applesauce. The notion of a monster cap, one which would drive opponents off the board with crushing blows, haunted the institution of skully. But in practice the bigger caps were unwieldy, tended to hang across the boundary lines, and were painful to shoot hard across the board with flicked fingers. You could fool with a big cap before it was filled with wax but then it would skid and slide right off the board too easily, and anyway a cap not filled with wax wasn’t really
skully
. You wanted wax. Candles could be bought or “boosted”—shoplifted—from Mr. Ramirez’s bodega, or volunteered by Dylan from his mother’s bedside supply. And Dylan became an expert at melting the candles, an operation always performed on the stoop of the abandoned house in the cause of not freaking out either parents or “little kids”—though Dylan and Earl were still the littlest kids around, apart from a couple of mute girls in severe cornrows—with lit matches. Then damping the wax into the cap, so it hardened into a smooth whole without seams or bumps, one which wouldn’t pop out when struck by an opponent’s cap. Like a tiny factory Dylan made rows of perfect skully caps and lined them up along the stoop: vanilla Yoo-Hoo with pink wax, Coke with green, Coco Rico, the cork of the cap still stinking of sugar, with white.

Strangely, after Dylan’s rapid rise to chief alchemist and philosopher of skully, nobody seemed to want to play the game anymore. Dylan presided over an ideal slate which was persistently shirked, deserted in favor of just about anything including standing around Henry’s front yard with hands in pockets, kicking at one another’s ankles and saying, “Fuck you, motherfucker.” Perhaps the Dean Street kids had never really been able to keep their attention on skully but only on the attendant crafts, on puzzling out the tradition. So much easier to tell a younger boy that he didn’t know to play skully than to have to play him to take his caps away, and what good were the caps anyway? Everybody lost their caps or even perversely threw them at the passing bus to watch them ding harmlessly and go wheeling into the gutter. Maybe skully sucked. Maybe to perfect a thing was to destroy it.

The Solver girls moved away. That was the first surprise. One day they were gone. Isabel Vendle peered out her window and saw the van, the movers tramping down the stoop with liquor-store boxes loaded with books and glassware, the girls on the sidewalk in the skates that seemed to grow from their ankles, whirling untouchable as ever, one final taunting pirouette. The girls’ parents hadn’t paid Isabel the courtesy of saying a word, hadn’t apparently known they were lines in a blueprint drawn by Isabel, founding participants in her Boerum Hill. So at the very start the circle shrank.

It didn’t matter much to Dylan, though. The Solver girls had gone to Saint Ann’s for school that first year, had vanished into Brooklyn Heights. They didn’t live on Dean Street, they floated above it. Dylan had gone to first grade at Public School 38 on the next block, real school, according to Rachel, public school. “He’s one of three white children in the whole school,” he’d overheard her boasting on the phone. “Not his class, not his grade—the whole school.”

She made it sound important. Dylan didn’t want to disillusion Rachel, but in fact each day his time in the classroom at P.S. 38 was only a prelude to affairs on the block. Kids in school didn’t look at each other, they looked at the teacher. Nobody Dylan knew from the street was in his class except Earl and one of the silent girls from Marilla’s yard. Henry and Alberto and the others were older and though they were presumably at the same school might as well have been in some other galaxy during the hours Dylan spent listening to Miss Lupnick teach the alphabet or how to tell time or what were the major holidays, hours Dylan spent reading the classroom’s small collection of tattered picture books over and over until he’d memorized them, hours spent abstracted, scribbling his pencil, drawing utopian skully boards with ten, twenty, fifty corners, drawing rectangles like frames of his father’s painted film and filling them in until they were entirely black. The alphabet Miss Lupnick taught was represented on the wall above her head by a series of personified cartoonlike letters—Mr. A, Eating an Apple; Mrs. B, Buying a Broom; and so on—and something insipid about the parade of grinning letters defeated Dylan’s will utterly. He sensed that no narrative could be constructed that would make Mr. A and Mrs. B do anything other than Eat an Apple or Buy a Broom and he couldn’t bear to drag his eyes along the row of letters atop the chalkboard to discover what it was that Mr. L or Mrs. T were doomed to do. Miss Lupnick read stories, so slowly it was agony. Miss Lupnick played records, songs about crossing the street and how different men had different jobs. Was someone trying to entertain him? Dylan had never learned less in his life. He glanced from side to side but the other kids sat blank-eyed in invisible cages at his left and right, legs tangled in the chair-desks, fingers up their noses. Some of them might be learning the alphabet, you couldn’t say from their faces. Some were from the projects. One girl was Chinese, which was strange if you thought about it. Whatever, they were helpless to assist or communicate with one another. Older kids picked up the first graders after class and led them away as though retarded, shaking their heads. What had the first graders done all day in class? Nobody could really say. The teacher talked to them like they were a dog all day and by three o’clock it was like leading a dog home.

The kids in your first-grade class might be in your second-grade class or you might never see them again. It might not matter. Even the ones you knew from the block you didn’t know in school. Dylan tried to touch his nose with his tongue until someone told him to stop. One or two kids didn’t ask to go to the bathroom until it was too late and they’d peed in their chair. One kid scratched his ear until it started bleeding. Sometimes Dylan could barely recall first grade seconds after bursting out onto Dean Street again.