The Poison Tree (29 page)

I returned to New York immediately following our phone call. After a haircut at his barber, he drove us to the Selective Service Bureau, and explained
that I was a student in good standing at the University of Wisconsin, and had never received a notice to register. The sergeant then produced copies of various notices sent to me, which I had destroyed or simply ignored. Surrounded by army posters and throngs of kids in khakis with shaved heads, I realized for the first time that this draft thing might be serious.

“Do you have proof he's full time? A transcript?” the sergeant asked.

“I assure you he's a full-time college student. He's entitled to a student deferment,” Dad insisted.

“Yes, so long as he is a student and is doing satisfactorily,” the sergeant answered. “That's why I need to see his academic record. What's your GPA, son?”

They both stared at me. “Umm, I don't remember my exact grade point average, if that's what you mean,” I answered nervously, “but I am full time.” I decided it would not be prudent to volunteer the information that I had been placed on strict probation for having a 1.9 GPA, or that I had been threatened with reduction to part-time status if my grades did not significantly improve.

“Full-time, huh?” the sergeant said dryly, and stood up. “We'll check with the registrar at his school.”

“Uh, Dad …” I started.

“Shut up, Henry!”

My father reached in his breast pocket and handed him a letter. “You might want to take a look at this before you call.” The sergeant put on reading glasses and sat back down at his metal desk. He peered down at the letter, then at me, trying to correlate the two.

Suddenly, he took out a stamp and slammed it down on my draft card. “All right, he's 1-Y,” he hollered, then to an unseen official, “We won't need this one unless the Viet Cong invade New York.”

“What just happened in there?” I asked as we left.

“None of your goddamn business,” Dad snapped, and walked several paces ahead of me.

Trying to catch up, I said, “Well, I think it is my business, don't you, Dad?”

“I told Dr. Irving to put a letter in your file describing your psychological treatment last summer, something that I could produce if worse came
to worst,” he said, scanning the street for something less embarrassing than his own son to rest his eyes on. “He wrote that he had treated you for severe depression and that he considered you a high risk for suicide in the military. He hates this fucking war. When that sergeant said he was going to call Wisconsin, I decided to play that card. Or do you think I should have let him check your academic record?”

“No.”

“I didn't think so, you sonofabitch.”

“Thanks, Dad,” I said after a moment of silence. He had rescued me, possibly saved my life.

“You'd better shape up, mister.”

“I will.”

“Strict probation!”

“H—How—You knew?”

“I asked—they told. Your grades better improve. Otherwise there's nothing I can do.”

“They will, Dad.”

“They'd better!” he said as we crossed the street. “You better wake up. You just dodged a bullet, young man. You just came this close to getting killed,” he said, thumb and forefinger centimeters apart.

I smiled at his hyperbole.

“You think I'm kidding?” he said incredulously. “Remember: I know you. You wouldn't last a day over there. Not ONE FUCKING DAY.” He elbowed past me and walked back to his car.

With my one year of college behind me, I felt much older. I had taken a work-study job at the university's library in the spring. This allowed me time to drift through the open stacks making discoveries about what I needed to read to become the person and writer I wanted to be. And at the year's end in June, I used the money to take the Greyhound bus back to New York instead of relying on my father to fly me home. When I arrived, my mother refused to speak to me. She still held a grudge because I hadn't gone to Hofstra, and eventually, Columbia. Whenever we spoke by phone while I was in Madison,
she sounded cordial at first, then found an excuse to hang up on me within five minutes. Although I knew her anger would subside if I moved back in with her, I wanted to live on my own. I found a small apartment on Riverside Drive, near where we lived when I was a child. My plan was to take one summer school course at Columbia and find a part-time job.

I had close to $5,000 from my bar mitzvah, which I hadn't touched and which would provide me with enough for rent and to live on until I found a job. When I went to the bank, however, I discovered that there was nothing left. Everything, even the savings bonds, had been cashed. When I phoned my mother to ask her how this happened, she said she had no idea. She was polite, cold, and non-committal. Mom was the only one, aside from Dad and me, who knew I had any money or where it was kept, and I knew my father would never touch it, not only because he didn't need to, but because he never would stoop that low. About financial matters he was always ethical, just as Grandma had said, even if his interpersonal ethics were manipulative and controlling.

I called my mother, whose response to why I needed the bar mitzvah money—“Hasn't your father given you enough?”—spoke volumes.

“How can all that money be gone, Mom?”

“Go ask your father, since you enjoy his company so much!” And she slammed down the phone.

When I asked my father who could have cashed the checks and Savings Bonds, he smiled. It was not a pleasant smile; it was a cold thing composed of white teeth, silver moustache, and a good deal of triumph. It was the smile his competitors saw before he destroyed them. It was the smile he wore when he hit an un-returnable winner down the line in tennis.

We went to the bank together. The manager, deferential in the face of my father's climbing stature in the financial world, presented copies of the withdrawal receipts that showed my name scrawled on the signature line. It was obviously not my writing. I was pretty sure I recognized Uncle Lee's handwriting, but I knew he never would forge my signature without my mother's prodding. His loyalty to his sister easily trumped his love for his nephew, especially since I was sure she had told him the whole Hofstra story. I also knew that in Lee's judgment, he had done nothing wrong. I hurt my mother by leaving home against her wishes. I had not been a good son like he was to Gramsie. When his parents told him to return from Harvard Law
School and help with the family business, he gave up his life and career as a lawyer unhesitatingly. I didn't.

In the end, my mother did not deny that Uncle Lee forged my signature, although she insisted the funds were, in fact, hers, since I had been under eighteen and in her custody. My father said I should take her to court and that he would pay for a lawyer. I was so angry that I seriously considered it. But then I remembered how strapped she was for money and what her life was like. Possibly even worse than before. I thought of the boxes stacked up in her bedroom, and the copy of Norman Vincent Peale's
The Power of Positive Thinking
on her bed. My father had not simply deserted her. He manipulated things so that he paid her almost nothing in alimony, and stood idly by as she was humiliated by creditors and evicted from our apartment on 86th Street. He instructed his attorneys to keep postponing hearings until she was left with nothing but Gramsie's food and Leon's loyalty. For some reason, I thought of advice my father had given me more than once in the event I was held up.

“Always fight dirty,” he advised. “Find out who the ring leader is—then go up and kick him in the balls. Then start swinging your bat—wildly—that'll stop 'em.”

As he told me this, I sensed the sensual thrill he got from imparting this wisdom to his son, just like the time I tried out for the basketball team and he told me the key to stopping your opponent from out-rebounding you under the basket was to “accidentally” stand on your opponent's sneaker as he tried to jump. But I couldn't do it, not even in practice. I never could.

When I went to my mother's apartment to collect my things for the move to Riverside Drive, she informed me she would be better off dead.

“What's the whole life for?” she mused, “I have only my two precious boys, and one of them has already abandoned his mother. Go to your father. You only care for him anyway. Go to him and his whores.”

I remembered a particular redhead named Betty with a young son. He went to horse shows with her and had even bought her a horse. Later, there was the blonde from Scarsdale. I knew the woman, whom he addressed as “Mrs. Jeffries,” and who I knew was married to one of his business associates, so what was she doing alone with him in his apartment? He did have women around a lot now; for all I knew they might be whores.

My brother remained steadfastly loyal to Mom, and she rewarded him with extravagant gifts she couldn't possibly afford. Whatever he asked for, she found some way to obtain. Knowing his love for cars, she acquired a Ford LTD for him when he turned sixteen. I think that what Bobby wanted was to leap over childhood and adolescence, and land directly into prosperous and sedate middle age. An LTD, the heavy, stolid car of a wealthy, middle-aged businessman, was exactly right for him. Even as a teenager.

Mom and Uncle Lee were inseparable during the year I spent at college. They were more like a happily married couple than any married couple I ever knew. Each morning, he called at precisely 6:00 a.m. to say hello and whisper, “Wake up, Beautiful!” At 10:00 o'clock at night he called again and said, “Sleep tight, Baby!” They had all their meals together and watched TV until it was time for her to walk back to her apartment on 72nd Street. They were both enamored of Norman Vincent Peale and attended his lectures and seminars. Mom felt protected and loved at last. When she spoke to me, every conversation concluded not with hanging up on me, but with the obligatory sing-song refrain: “Every day and in every way, things will get better and better.”

One morning, I woke up and it was August, time to think about returning to Madison for my sophomore year. I said goodbye to my little apartment on Riverside Drive (my father “loaned” me the money, although he refused my efforts to repay him from the pittance I got from my part-time job operating a switchboard at Columbia). Sunlight streamed through the curtains, and everything felt different—I felt like a man who wakes up after having been in bed for weeks with a fever. I felt well. And the most curious thing was that I hadn't even realized how sick I had been. The illness, contracted in a particularly virulent form, was adolescence. And although I knew only too well I was not to be mistaken for an adult, something in my body told me that I had weathered a storm and survived. I was now about to start the next chapter of my life.

As my second year of college swung into gear, I missed Laura. I rationalized her absence by deciding that a certain self-imposed, monastic isolation would be good for me as I pursued my real vocation, whatever that might be. I practiced the same kind of abstinence toward my love of sports. I had been drawn to Wisconsin since its football team had lost so heroically in the 1963 Rose Bowl. I could have gotten tickets to any game I wanted since the team was terrible and there were plenty of empty seats, but I never attended a single game in the four years I was there. This was not because I didn't want to watch the team lose, it was because I thought that depriving myself of something I wanted would make me stronger, and help me develop as an artist.

On Saturday afternoons I remained in my room and chose something impressive and grand from my bookshelf, while the rest of my peers, as I thought, wasted their time with something as frivolous as going to the football game, cheering “OHHHH SHITTT” as another game was fumbled away. While everyone else was at Camp Randall stadium, I curled up in my room with my penknife, a wedge of Gouda, a loaf of crusty bread, and Milton's
Paradise Lost
as company. Above the bed stood a nineteenth-century print I had found in Paul's Bookstore on State Street of a strange gypsy girl gazing wistfully into space, longing for me perhaps. Her name, I decided, was Esmeralda. On my stereo I listened to Rachmaninoff's
Second Piano Concerto
. However, since I passionately loved football, I couldn't stop thinking about the game I was missing. Unable to concentrate on Milton, I stayed in my dorm eating Gouda and listening to the game on radio. When it was over, I felt guilty, depressed, and sick from eating all the cheese.

After ending things with Laura, I resumed my uniform of black sport coats and ties and didn't participate in classes any longer, preferring to watch intently, defiantly, and above all, judgmentally. If someone said something that I considered stupid or banal, I stared at them from a remote corner of the classroom. I thought I could somehow compel them to psychically confess their folly with my disdainful glares. This, of course, never happened.

There was one girl, though. She sat across from me in my Afro-Asian history class and had long hair the color of Greek honey. I never tried to pin her down with my withering stare. Instead, I watched the way her blue cable-knit turtleneck sweater clung to her breasts. So I suppose I did stare, just in a different way. Once, she asked if she could borrow Lady Murasaki's
The Tale of Genji
, a novel we had been assigned to read for Monday. There were no copies left at the bookstore, she said, pushing her hair back over her shoulder. Her name was Patty.

It was a surprisingly warm Saturday morning in October when I walked over to Showalter dorm to lend her the book. She took it, and after a few moments of strained silence, asked if I wanted to walk along the lake. I said yes. She was animated and enthusiastic and seemed to love life. She had a crazy sense of humor, which was different from other girls I had met. She also said she had once seen me throwing rocks at the ducks on the lake one day while her younger sister was visiting.