To Make Death Love Us (13 page)

Serena dreamed
silently at him in the dark. Not giving him courage, not tendering strengths to him he did not
have. She only dreamed inside him and discovered the great courage in his own heart, the great
strength in his tiny body, and removed the fears that would have shack­led him, that would not
have let them happen. In this way, she saw into his secret self and let it all go free, to act
and do.

Colonel John smiled
at the dark of the night.

He was in
command.

When Colonel John
was a little boy—and there was hu­mor in that, when he thought of that expression, because he had
in some ways never quite ceased being a little boy —he remembered an old man in a park who had
once terrified him. The old man sat in the park waiting for little boys who looked exactly like
young John to come along, or so the old man said, at any rate.

The old man had
talked very pleasantly, at first. He bade young John sit beside him on the bench which he had
done with some nervousness. The old man had es­caped from a circus, a white one in a huge
building with many strange rooms and screaming animals in padded
cages. That's how the old man described it and there was such a
funny, strange quality to his voice when he said it. The old man had a brown paper bag on his
lap. It was full of light bulbs, very cleverly stolen light bulbs, the old man
claimed.

He drew a dusty
light bulb from his sack. It was gray with age and much fly bespeckled. He ofiFered it to young
John, who backed away along the bench seat, having been properly warned by his mother of
strangers who ofiFered gifts. The old man smiled mysteriously at the wide-eyed boy at the end of
the bench.

"No stomach for it,
then, young sir? Well then, not to waste it. I'll just have it then."

With those words,
the old man broke the light bulb between his teeth and made exaggerated eating sounds as he
chewed the broken glass and swallowed it. The old man smiled, with shredded, bloody lips, at the
boy.

The old man popped
another light bulb in his mouth and young John ran screaming from the bench as if he himself had
been attacked by the crazy old man.

He never looked
back, never saw the old man again, but he saw the old man's bloodied mouth in his dreams for
years after that.

Later, he had
learned from his mother that the old man had escaped from a mental institution. He could never
quite figure out why it was such a terrifying memory. Still in all, it was something that stayed
with him all the years of his childhood. As an adult, he had pondered this puz­zling memory from
childhood and had satirically de­scribed it to himself in a very literary way. The old man
represented the pitiful inadequacy of human illumination to combat the all-encompassing moral
darkness of the world.

Other than this
strange interlude, he had had a fairly idyllic childhood. He had been a toy in his own world
of
toys and had lived in a bright and
all-too-shiny world for as long as he dared, much longer than all other children.

He wore fine suits
of blue sateen with velveteen stripes all down the sides and fashioned into piping at every edge
and seam. There were gilt epaulettes, buttons, braids, and a brave show of tiny medals and awards
of mock valor, all painted gold and silver, stuck to his chest with fancy rib­bons. He was
dressed as a toy soldier and owned himself instead of having one.

There were
miniature boots of red patent leather, a sword about as long as a broom straw, and a cockaded hat
peaked front and back, which held a great, white, crested plume.

He had the costume
made for him when he was five or six. He was the son and only child of a solicitor father and a
gentlewoman mother. They were, as well, secretly ashamed of Colonel John, for they saw in his
diminutive stature public evidence of their equally small passions. They did love him, however,
in the same pale, unstressed, unheated way in which they loved each other.

They resided in an
attached house of three stories in the favored quarter of London known as Kensington.

It was a special
pleasure for young John to go for long walks with his mother through Kensington Gardens. He
sailed little boats of his own making in the Serpentine. They explored the wonders of the bird
sanctuary, oft times listened to concerts given at the bandstand close on to Park Lane and had
tiffin from time to time in the Ring tea house. Twice, they even went so far as Marble Arch and
stood with the colorful Sunday crowds listening to the public speakers on the Corner. But both
times, his mother had had to carry him home, so weary had his little legs become. So, in
consideration of that, such great walking journeys were curtailed.

When he was eight,
John and his mother and father
went on a
Sunday outing to the fun park at distant Batter-sea. It was, by far, the farthest afield John had
ever gone from his home in Kensington.

As the three of
them rested for a moment on long wooden benches, a friendly woman in her middle years tickled
little John beneath the chin and remarked upon what a splendid little fellow he was. When John
thanked her with careful and rather flowery courtesy, she was, at first, much amused by the gay
intelligence and eloquence of such a young child. Then she peered closer and saw him to be much
older than the three years she had taken him to be.

"Why, he's a
midget!" cried the woman in surprise.

The father and
mother exchanged a telling look over John's head.

The woman hurried
off to report the news of the child midget to others of her acquaintance in the park. At last,
the not-so-casual glances of passersby—moving past with deliberate intent, gathered to see this
strange wonder, this child freak—caused uncontrollable spasms in the mother's hands and dark
blotches of color above the collar of the father's shirt.

They left in
somewhat of a hurry and never entertained the idea of such public display again.

From that moment,
John's childhood became a private and not a public one. And thus it was to be for quite some
time.

With the advent of
war, however, there was forced a need for moving out and about in the outside world. His parents
resisted the safety of the Underground shelters for some time, stiff in their pride of person,
but after the great German air raid of September 7, 1940, and after some long and almost tearful
consultation together, his parents decided they must use the crowded public bomb shelters. A very
near miss, just two doors away, had killed
two of their neighbors who also had not seen fit to take shelter underground.

Young John's
attention to the war was adult in quality. He learned what he knew of it from the newspapers and
the B.B.C. Reading and listening to the wireless were major parts of his occupation of the day,
since he attended no school and had been taught his lessons in grammar and arithmetic by his
mother and father. He had never been registered for any school, and, indeed, as far as the proper
authorities were concerned, was not known to exist.

But he had visions
of glory that were greater than those of the adults around him—or perhaps merely more fantas­tic,
since less practical. He fashioned dreams in which he had miraculously grown tall—by now he had
been taught that this was something that life would deny him—and fought as grown men
fought.

His fairy-tale
imaginings grew concrete and constant when the first V-l, the "buzz bomb," fell upon London some
seven days after the invasion of the Continent.

Young John created
a scenario that covered all practical considerations. If the Germans had created such a weapon,
the British could make one as well. The newspa­pers declared that the V-l bombs, though
devastating in their effect upon whatever structures they might hit, were essentially a
strategically useless weapon since they could not be guided with accuracy to their
targets.

And so, John went
so far as to design an imaginary missile, similar to pictures in the daily press of the flying
bombs caught in flight, that incorporated pilot's controls and a tiny cockpit for someone as
small as himself.

This machine of
death, launched from a suitable site, would, in his vivid imagination, fly to the very heart of
Berlin, to the Reichschancellory itself or, alternately, de­pending on his dream, to the mountain
fastness where the evil genie, Adolf Hitler, sometimes dwelled. John would
fly his explosive little missile right through the window
or down through the chimney and kill the monster before he could raise his arm and say "Heil
Myself."

On a map of London,
he traced the path he must take to the Air Ministry in Whitehall where he intended to pre­sent
his plan. There were great difficulties attending such a journey since he had never, alone,
ventured more than one block from his house in any direction.

As the plan
crystallized, the more terrible V-2 rockets began to shower upon London. At last, his father
decided to send his small son out of danger.

John was delivered
to his maiden aunt in Biddlestone, a small village close to Bath in Wilts, who had neither
ap­proved of her brother's marriage or the birth of his unfor­tunate son.

A week later,
John's house and all it contained, includ­ing his mother and father, were smashed down into a
hole in the ground. It became their final burial place. Very little of them was found. John was,
ashamedly, not partic­ularly saddened by the news. It was not that he did not love them—that, of
course, he did—but rather it was that he intuited that their deaths might well be the beginning
of his own life in the world so long denied him.

After the war, soon
after his seventeenth birthday, he ran away from his aunt—much to her relief—and Biddles­tone,
never to return. Like Dick Whittington, he went to London—that strange and wonderful city of
London that he had never been allowed to know—in order to make his fortune. He did not, of
course, become Lord Mayor.

Instead, after a
long and heartbreaking series of rebuffs and cruel rejections, he found work in a discreet
bordello in Mayfair. It was, of course, not what he had expected or sought. Still, it was the
only place where the novelty of his appearance added a certain glamour to the house of his
employment.

The madam of the
house instructed him to dress in a velvet suit with a cavalier's ruff. It was an elegant house,
patronized by the cream of British society—so the madam was at pains to explain to one and all.
The madam consid­ered herself a courtesan, not a prostitute, and very much acted out the role of
a woman from the old Renaissance. John was a part of that delicate fabrication as
well.

John endured, even
enjoyed, the courtly pose and grand manner and began to think of himself as an actor.

Somewhat
innocently, he enjoyed the company of the madam's young ladies, who took a delighted and
affec­tionate comfort in his less fortunate presence. In time, nearly all of them took him
companionably into their beds and taught him such wonders of touching and human closeness that
made his grand dreams of noble, sacrificial death seem a damn foolishness beyond
reasoning.

So skilled did he
become, so gentle and so caring in his love play, that the time came when the young ladies of the
house began somewhat jealously to fight over their affec­tion for him. He became a disturbance
and a liability to the peace of the house, and the madam did, at last and with much reluctance,
let him go.

With great
dreams—this time of being a great and no­ble actor the likes of Edmund Kean—John went to Soho,
dressed like a miniature toff in green-checkered suits and yellow-gold shirts. His planned
profession had no open doors for him, only a great deal of scorn and derision to heap on his
small frame. Undaunted, John smoked big cigars and lived the part of the great actor he thought
himself to be, living in grand style until the money ran out.

After the money was
gone, John was forced to trade his dreams for less honorable things. Hunger brought new skills,
albeit unhappy ones. He learned to pick pockets— which were eye level and amazingly handy to one
of his
size—and roll drunks—not so
handy—to supplement his miniscule pay as a barker before the entrance of a girlie
show.

But always John
dreamed of greater things. Variety shows, night clubs, or even the cinema. He found his chance
when he was asked to join an English circus that intended to invade and conquer the United States
with "a real, honest-to-Gawd English circus of the old fashioned sort."

The year was 1955.
Colonel John was twenty-five years old.

The invasion was
less than successful. The American sponsor withdrew his support at the last moment. The English
impresario absconded with an incredibly ugly ele­phant girl and a week's receipts, meager as they
were. John Featherstone, not yet a Colonel, not a war hero, not a great actor, not a lot of
things, was stranded in Philadel­phia.

If there was a
worse place to be stranded for a person like John, he couldn't imagine where.

The Philadelphian
winters of those years, as he worked carnivals and store-front sideshows, were cold, too cold,
for his small bones. They reminded him of London and made his heart want to return while his head
insisted that he remain and make his fortune.