The Stardust Lounge (5 page)

The truth is that Stephen's father intends to keep him in Missouri. He will live there with his father and stepmother. Stephen's father and I have argued about the issue
of how long Stephen will stay in Missouri. In the end he gives me an ultimatum: Steve goes to live with him for good. Or not at all.

Of course Stephen doesn't know this. He thinks he's going for a brief visit. If he knew the truth he would run away.

I watch him board the plane through the glass partitions at Logan Airport. I'm crippled by my betrayal, glad that his brother is with him.

Once the boys have boarded, Stan and I walk to his flight, boarding now, back to Maryland. We say good-bye. He hugs me, as is his way, firmly around my shoulders, kisses me. All gesture, all simple cultural convention. I don't ask why he's leaving early.

Alone in Brookline, I've gone to bed. I nearly sleepwalk through the teaching of my classes at the university, make short trips to the grocery for soup, bread, coffee. But the rest of the time I stay in bed with the electric blanket turned on high. It's February now. Stan stays on in Maryland. Charles is back at school, and Stephen is living with his father and stepmother in Missouri.

He's wreaking havoc on their household—sneaking out at night, inciting new friends to trouble—while I'm burrowed under, lost for a while, sad. I'm translating Dante.

I've accepted the assignment from an editor to take on the thirty-second canto of the
Inferno,
the Ninth Circle, Hell's basement, in which those who have betrayed family and culture are locked in ice.

So far I have written,
Were there a language dark enough to speak / truly of that hole harrowed by crags / gravity itself could not fall through to…

The original begins with
S'io avessi
—
Had I.
Sinclair's translation begins
If I had.
But I take liberties. Just now I am more likely to side with those poor traitors stuck in the ice than with Dante.

For the past semester Public Enemy is what I've heard coming from Stephen's room, Public Enemy crowding me, crowding the spaces of this huge apartment while I wore headphones, the big kind that hug the entire ear. I listened to Beethoven's Opus 57, the
Appassionata
sonata, beginning to end. The little anthem with which the piece commences felt near to me even as the booming of open rebellion vibrated under my feet.

Stephen would have laughed, disgusted with me, if he knew what I listened to. He would judge me as irresponsible, an ostrich, pathetically middle class, a white chick wearing blinders—or in this case, earphones—against the social and political chaos he recently discovered in his young life.

Never mind my feeble offerings about growing up through the sixties, the marches I participated in, the protests. “I went barefoot,” I heard myself absurdly reporting, “in winter. I hitchhiked. I had a boyfriend who quit school to protest the war. What do you want from me?”

Stephen wouldn't have it. “What about
now,”
he'd say. “What are you doing
now.
Teaching at a cushy school full of white bread, writing poems nobody
gets
about
nature.
Listen up, Mom. Listen to these lyrics. Mom, you're getting
old.”

As the
Appassionata
moved up and down the octaves, great spaces built around me, as though days, weeks, even
years had passed. Inside those spaces, my rage could rise and recede, leaving me stumped at how a vigilant daughter of the sixties could be accused by her fourteen-year-old son of social and political indifference.

I listened to Beethoven so many times that there were moments in the tape that garbled, went underwater. The music drowned. I listened driving to and from school, or driving around at night looking for Stephen, watching a weak sun rise over the abandoned train yards as Beethoven went crazy.

Beethoven. Public Enemy. I'm lying in bed imagining Dante looking through the language as through the wide-angle lens of a camera, framing, over the full range of the octaves, a dark place, a lake of ice unremittingly cruel.

It
must
be ice and not stone, not just because of the killing sensation of cold, but because of a fundamental belief humans hold in regard to ice. Ice cracks, it breaks up and thaws eventually.

No, says Dante. Not this ice:

But even places on earth that have been frozen for thousands of years thaw finally, shift and thaw to reveal ancient surprises, mastodons, woolly mammoths. My oldest
brother has a mastodon's tusk that I have seen and touched. I've petted the coarse hair above the ivory.

Ice cracks. It melts and offers, whole and preserved, sailors buried in permafrost along the Arctic islands. The flesh on their bodies is startling, intimate. The Arctic anthropologists are awed, silenced by their finds, by the sad flesh preserved, gifts of the ice.

During the autopsies performed by the doctors who have set up tents on the gray stony tundra in Arctic summer—the place so flat, so vast, one cannot tell where the earth ends and the sky begins—the exhumed's perfect, one-hundred-fifty-year-old faces are napkin-covered, as if to shield them from their own undoing.

Some of the sailors’ descendants have been allowed to come along. Outside the tent, they finger the buttons on the jackets of their dead, the jackets and trousers and shoes that have been laid out in the Midnight Sun in the shapes of the men who wore them.

The buttons on the jackets are silver. One descendant asks, may he keep one? He's aware of a change in himself. He weeps without embarrassment before the camera. He says that to look into the face of his relative is to see his own, and his children.

Well, fine,
Dante leers up at me a long watery grin through the ages.
That's “sweet.” But the
ice
in Caina, Antenora? This ice will never, ever eric…

I can translate about three lines of the canto at a time before I must take a break, slipping carefully down under the covers so as not to knock dictionaries, drafts, my copy of the
Inferno
from the bed.

Dozing, waking to translate a few more lines, I begin to
tire of Dante, his unequivocal ice, his righteousness, the way he goes carelessly over the lake kicking the heads riveted there.

No wonder they snarl at him.
Fuck him,
I think, and laugh at myself for the first time in weeks. I say it aloud. “Fuck Dante and his fucking
Inferno.”

My voice rings through the empty rooms.

During the last year with Stephen I'm afraid I have joined him in his foul mouth. It's something Stan has come to hate about me. Certainly, before all the trouble, I was a reasonable, benevolently manipulative post-sixties mom suggesting to my children that they “save the four-letter words for appropriate occasions. Otherwise,” I'd coo, “they lose their power.”

In the event that one or the other's judgments regarding “appropriate occasions” faltered, the boys were fined a nickel for the initial offense, a dime for the next, and so on, a sort of monetary Richter scale approach to the problem.

But when things began to slide with Stephen, he laughed at my solution, reached into his pockets, and tossed dollar bills at me. Where did the money come from?

“Appropriate occasion, Mom?” he sneered. “That's every fucking minute of my life.”

From my bedroom I can look down the hall and into Stephen's room, exactly as he left it, on the wall facing me a huge poster of Malcolm X with the caption, “By Any Means Necessary,” the only noise from there, his hamster on his wheel.

One evening as I'm working with the translation, eating
something from a can, I realize that the wheel has gone silent. The animal Stephen has named for a famous surfer lies on the floor of his cage. The right side of his head is horribly swollen. He looks to struggle to right himself. I reach into the cage and try to set him on his feet but he falls to the side again and again.

Filling a syringe with a bit of water, sugar, and a codeine tablet, I hold the little flailing thing and inject the liquid into his mouth. After a few minutes he quiets.

I take him back to bed with me, place him on my chest, and lie back. When I wake he's dead.

I keep him with me awhile, examine him closely, sadly, the way one could never examine a body were it alive. I pry open his mouth to see the fine teeth, the tiny perfect tongue, his pouches full of food; he who was born, lived, and died in a cage, who meant little to his owner, this animal being a replacement for a previous beloved hamster named Fergie.

When that animal died, not unlike this one, of a massive swelling of the right eye—some sort of hemorrhage, perhaps—Stephen had grieved as intensely and openly as one would expect of this child.

So Fergie's death was surrounded by pomp and ritual, including a secret burial under a yew tree at the front of our apartment house—secret because the landlords forbid pets in the apartment. If they visited for any reason, we put Fergie's elaborate bright orange-and-yellow plastic Habitrail in the bathtub with the shower curtain drawn and the door closed.

Stephen even chose a tombstone, a piece of hand-sized black shale we'd brought back from Cornwall, and he
wrote on the stone, in white-out, Fergie's name and death date.

Stephen had never attended a funeral, and so when I asked him to speak a few words over Fergie's grave—in a downpour, by the way, though we were protected under the huge yew—Stephen confused grief, as many of us do, with shame, and began confessing things—that he had smoked cigarettes, stolen money from my purse, that he had touched a girl on her breasts.

I doze again, dream in two languages …
per ch'oi mi volsi e vidimi davante /e sotto i piedi un lago gelo / avea di vetro e non d'acqua sembiante …
fall through the high drift, the cloud regions of the bells of medieval Italian to the jackhammer pounding of late-twentieth-century American English, the hamster on my chest.

Where do the guns come from?

I'm driving home, down from Portsmouth, Newbury-port. I've been looking for houses to rent, houses away from the city and its gangs and guns, but close enough for me to commute into work in Medford.

Where do they come from?

Stephen will be returning to me at the end of spring semester. He is in more trouble than ever. His father has thrown up his hands.

It's early April, a Sunday. Up from Providence. Nothing. Traffic, raining. Houses beat up, or the rent's too high. But I will find something. Sooner or later I will find a house for us.

In these few months while Stephen has been away, I've had a rest. I've slept, read, taken long walks in recovery. I've begun rigorous workouts at a gym. I am in training for my son's return.

As I've grown stronger, my fatigue and fear have given way to cautious engagement with the future. I understand now that no one has the answer to my son's troubles. My belief that answers come from others—from therapists, school counselors, or teachers, from the law—has paralyzed me. No one will rescue us. This is the way it is: Stephen's adolescence will feel like a lifetime, his fourteenth year like ten.

I drive east from Littleton, south from Salem, late in the day, snow on the ground in the lengthening light. Some days I allow myself a good loud blubbering cry, then take a deep breath, pull over, and fix my makeup.

Where do they come from, guns taken so easily into the hands of boys to be traded, lent, stolen, bought, and sold?

The boy Stephen loved toy guns. He collected an arsenal of toy machine guns, all olive-drab plastic, or camouflaged green, gray, and black. He wrapped the stocks with electrical tape. He, his cousins, and his friends wore army fatigues to look like the G.I. Joe figures they amassed, figures that come with tiny guns, knives, bayonets.

They played for hours, staging battles, building little forts in the dirt, creating front lines, and setting the tanks in staggered lines, contorting the soldiers in aggressive poses.

If they were lucky to have some fireworks—black cats or ladyfingers—they'd stand back from their combat zone and drop the fireworks into the bunkers.

Sometimes I was called out to witness the explosions.

“Mom! Come see! We're gonna drop the bombs now!”

I'd watch Stephen and his cousins touch the wicks of the ladyfingers with punks, as their fathers and uncles
taught them, then flip them skillfully toward the battle scene. The little men went flying, the dust of the battles kicked up, the pieces of twigs, grass, stones scattering that were the bunkers, the boys by turns roaring with laughter and admiring the smoke, how authentic it appeared in miniature as it lingered over their destruction.

This was play and I recognized it as such. These were boys playing army like my brothers used to, brothers now educated, prosperous citizens with sons of their own— sons who, summers, visiting the grandparents, played passionate games of army with my sons.

By the time we moved to Brookline, I was aware of the culture's raised eyebrows regarding mothers who let their sons play with toy guns. The neighbors frowned as Stephen and his friends, in full fatigues and armed with plastic guns, moved down the sidewalk toward the park to stage life-size battles.

I held my ground. This was play And if the neighbors didn't approve, they could read in the
Atlantic
in the autumn of 1989 an article by Bruno Bettleheim that gave language to my instincts about toy gun play.

Bettleheim suggests that the phenomenon of young boys playing with toy guns is both harmless and necessary. They play with guns, he says, because they feel defensive.

A previous collection of essays in
The Uses of Enchantment
discusses how children are perpetually bombarded with feelings of powerlessness at the hands of the authority figures in their lives.