Island, p.3
Island, page 3
Going back to Lincoln Harbor, Burton ran the Thelma M in close to the shore of a small island and stopped. To Fred’s astonishment, the two crewmen stripped off their clothes and dove over the side. Burton threw them a big cake of coarse yellow soap, and they swam around, soaping and splashing.
“Go ahead, kid. You don’t realize how bad you smell.”
“Me?”
“Go ahead. Always stop here on a sunny day to fresh up. Hey, Joe, want to go berryin’?”
Joe said yes, and Burton threw a large tin can into the water.
“Good berries there. Best you’ll ever see.”
“Berries?”
“Raspberries. You like ’em? Swim over and get yourself a bellyful.”
He took his clothes off and stood on the gunwale of the Thelma M, looking down at the dark-green water, and he couldn’t jump. But he felt Burton’s eyes on his back, so he jumped, his arms and legs splayed out. The fear of the deep water left as he found himself swimming. It was only a few yards in to the shallows, where the two other men were already standing up and wading ashore.
He followed them in. Except for their forearms and necks, their bodies were startlingly white, with big tufts of black hair at the crotch. They were the first men he had ever seen naked. He was embarrassed to look at them, but they paid no attention to him, and he got over that. He followed them across the beach to a rough meadow with a tangle of raspberry bushes along one edge. At the far side of the meadow was a small gray house.
He wandered around among the bushes, picking berries and eating them, the sun hot on his skin. The berries were delicious and dead ripe. They were like soft furry cups, and they almost fell into his hand. His fingers got red from berry juice, and he ate more and more, working his way along the edge of the field until he came to the house. It was boarded up, but out of curiosity he went to one of the windows and tried to look through a crack in the blind. He couldn’t see much, except for a fireplace with some big chairs in front of it. He walked around the house. It was compact and neat, snugged up tight. There was a rain barrel at one corner, a bug slowly swimming around in it. He took the bug out.
Standing there naked in the sun, watching the bug crawl away, he began to be washed with a sense of perfection unlike anything he had ever known. The sun and the taste of the berries and the salt on his skin and his careless nakedness and the grasses and the serene gray house … He shut his eyes and leaned against the rough shingles, hot on his shoulders. As he leaned there, it came to him that this was the best moment of his life.
Back at the boardinghouse, his mother was predictably upset. A long lecture followed. Terribly worried. Didn’t know the name of the man he was out with. Three days overdue. Thought he was drowned. Police out looking. Dreadful way to treat an invalid father.
But the magic of that island and that house was on him. He scarcely heard her.
“On top of it all, Frederick, you smell absolutely revolting. Your sweater. It’s disgusting. You’ll have to take a bath right now. And remember to clean the tub. You have fish scales on you.”
He lay in the tub and hated to see the fish scales go. Back in his room, he put on his other pants. His mother had already set his sweater in her basin to soak and was turning out the pockets of his dirty pants.
“What’s this?”
“My pay. Burton paid me.” Five fishy bills. All that was left. He never saw Burton again.
But the island stayed with him. He thought about it often as he grew up, and amused himself by pretending that he lived there. Later, when things began to get bad, it came in stronger. And when they got really bad, it was the only nice thing he had to think about, so he thought about it a great deal. He built elaborate fantasies about living there, sometimes with Fran, sometimes alone. But the perfection of the fantasies was so different from the reality of his life that he could scarcely endure it. That was one of the things that made him cry in the park. He ended up talking to Hennerkop about the island and the little gray house over and over again.
3
BY THE WAY, ARE YOU JEWISH?”
“What makes you ask?”
“Just curious.”
“Is that the only reason?”
“What else would there be?”
“There may be another reason. I ask you to consider that.”
“What the hell!”
“I ask you to consider why you avoid answering certain questions.”
“Me avoid. That’s a hot one. Me avoid. I ask a simple question, and I get a question back.”
“Is it a simple question?”
“There you go again. Of course it’s a simple question. Are you Jewish?”
“I am of Dutch descent.”
“A Dutchman.”
“Yes. Are you relieved?”
“What do you mean, relieved?”
“That I am not Jewish.”
“Not really. Well, maybe a little.”
“Why?”
That was a complicated one. He really hadn’t known any Jews when he was young. There was one boy in his class at school, Billy Solomon. The other kids called him Billy the Kike and gave him a hard time. He and Billy were at the bottom of the class, so he tried it out on him one day: Billy the Kike, and Billy hit him in the mouth. From then on, he was at the bottom and Billy was next to the bottom. But when they moved on into high school together, Billy in some mysterious way had elevated himself. He stopped being called Billy the Kike and went out with girls. Not with top girls like Joanne Fensler, but with the grungier types down in the middle or lower levels of the class. Still, Billy had somebody. He didn’t.
It was not until he got to college that he began to learn that Jews were people that other people could look down on. Again, he didn’t know any, but he followed the style and found that the presence of Jews in the world allowed him to lift himself up a little. Later, in business, he met Jews, was friendly with Jews, competed with Jews, actually liked some, even envied them their emotionality, their willingness to take chances with themselves. All this made him uncomfortable. It was two-faced. But his need to build himself was devouring. Like the buttons on the Wragge shirt collar, being non-Jewish was one of the innumerable bootstraps by which he could hoist himself up, a little here, a little there, and eventually be recognized as one who was up himself.
“I don’t really dislike Jews.”
Silence.
“I mean, they’re really no different from anybody else.”
Silence.
“I mean, there are a lot of them at W and W. Some of them are very nice.”
Silence.
“Some of them push pretty hard.”
“Do they push harder than you push?”
“That’s not the point.”
“Why do you mention it, then?”
“I just happened to mention it. Everybody’s in there pushing. You have to do that.”
“So you and Jews push the same. Is that correct?”
“That’s not the point.”
“What is the point?”
“Huh?”
“Why do you dislike Jews?”
“I never said I dislike them.”
“Do you dislike them?”
“Of course not. There are good ones and bad ones.”
“Why, then, do you take the trouble to explain to me that you do not dislike Jews?”
“Wait a minute. You asked me. I’ve got to talk about something. Everything I do talk about, you seem to be telling me it’s something I shouldn’t talk about.”
“No. You misunderstand me. I do not ask you not to talk about something. I ask you why you choose to talk about that something. It is at that point that you change the subject and talk about something else.”
“Well, you pick on me.”
“Why do you think I pick on you?”
Christ almighty. He never stopped.
What Hennerkop didn’t seem to understand was that it wasn’t a matter of judging just Jews. He judged everybody, in terms of how dangerous they might be to him. For as long as he could remember, almost everybody was dangerous in one way or another. He learned early to be careful. He tried to anticipate what people might do to him. He was mindful of his own vulnerability, his lowliness, to use the kind of biblical word he kept encountering in prayers and sermons and hymns. Much of what he did all day long was to conceal that lowliness as well as he could. One way was to find people lowlier than himself, people with cracks or flaws who enabled him to feel better about himself.
“Not exactly better. More like safer.”
Silence.
“I mean, I felt in danger all the time when I was a kid. I never knew when some other kid was going to do something terrible to me.”
Silence.
“I mean, I got picked on all the time.”
Silence.
“You don’t know what it’s like to always wear hand-me-downs from other kids in the parish. From Frenchy LaValle and his brother. Both the LaValle kids had a lot of clothes. Frenchy was in my class and Maurice was one grade ahead, and they were both big kids. When my mother gave me a new pair of pants—I don’t mean new from the store but new for me to wear—it would be a pair that Frenchy had outgrown, and my mother would have shortened them. But they were big at the waist and baggy in the seat. I was a skinny kid, and I would put them on with a kind of sick feeling because I knew that when I got to school and recess let out, Frenchy would spot his pants and the trouble would start.”
“What did you do?”
“What could I do? I cried. I cried a lot at recess.”
“Did you tell your parents?”
“What good would that do? The minister’s sissy kid bawling to his parents? What could my mother do except go to the teacher and complain, and have the teacher come out at recess and tell the other kids not to pick on nice little Frederick. As soon as she went back in, it would have been worse than before. I didn’t know much, but I knew that much.”
“You mentioned your mother. Why not your father?”
“He never did anything.”
Elementary school was pretty awful. He tried not to go out at recess, but they made him. They found him hiding in the lavatory. Kids hung around after school, laying for him. He learned to leave by the side door on a dead run. They would chase him for a block or so and then give up. Even though he was small, he was speedy. By the fourth grade he could outrun everybody in the Whittington school except Maurice LaValle.
He would arrive home panting, still scared, trying to appear normal as he went in. His father would be in his study, supposedly composing a sermon or working on parish matters but usually asleep. His mother would be out somewhere in the neighborhood, doggedly doing one or another of the million things a minister’s wife was supposed to do, walking because she had no car, enduring the condescensions of her neighbors and also their charity (his clothes, for example), because she was the wife of a failed man. A lot of the club and committee work her husband was supposed to do, she did. She taught Sunday school. He was in her class, but she had the sense never to look at him or ask him a question.
Looking back, he could see her as a tragic figure. At the time, she seemed merely formidable. She was a grim silent woman who took out her frustration on him, reminding him of his failings with a kind of exhausted sarcasm that made him feel hopelessly weak and ineffectual.
His father scarcely spoke to him. Nobody came to the rectory. Anything having to do with church affairs took place in the church basement. His house was a silent one, and he crept around, slowly learning to keep his feelings to himself. At home he spent most of his time in his room. His solace was his library card; he read a great deal.
Even the furniture at the rectory was hand-me-down from other households. He realized that when he went to birthday parties. Being the minister’s son, he always got invited, but he always stood in a corner in a kind of perpetual terror, wondering when something unexpected was going to hit him. And it was all his own fault; that had been drilled into him. There were prayers at home every morning, his father, his mother, and himself kneeling in a row in the parlor: Forgive us, O Lord, our trespasses, for we are miserable sinners. He was a miserable sinner; he knew it. His mother was forever reminding him how forgetful and shiftless he was—which was true: the best way of dealing with life seemed to be to take no risks, do nothing except his homework, keep out of the way.
He envied most other people, even the milkman. He would wake up on a winter morning to the sound of the milk truck. Wrapping himself in a blanket to keep out the cold, he would creep to the end of his bed and look out. It would be pitch dark still, but the inside of the truck would be brightly lit. He would watch the milkman open a door in the back and climb in to fill his metal basket with bottles. It would look warm and cozy in there, and the milkman had a simple job that he knew how to do, and he had no troubles, and even though it was cold and he wore mittens and his feet squeaked in the snow as he walked to the Crowes’ next door (one cream, eight milk) and then across to his house (two milk), the bottles clinking in his basket as he walked, the small boy couldn’t help comparing the small bright coziness of that truck with the dark silence of his own home. He knew, even then, that being a milkman was better than being Frederick Fay.
The teasing stopped along about the fourth or fifth grade. But the loneliness didn’t. He moved on up into high school along with Maurice and Frenchy LaValle, who had grown into immense boys who played on the football team. They were the ones who dated Joanne Fensler, the top girl in his class. He himself never spoke to Joanne, because it was her mother, Mrs. Fensler, who was so active in the church and sometimes drove his mother around on church errands. Joanne’s looks and her popularity and the driving all made it impossible for him to talk to her.
But he could look at Joanne, who sat diagonally in front of him in study hall. From where he sat he could see the back of her head and most of the side of her face. She usually studied with one elbow on her desk, leaning her head on her hand. He could look under her arm at the curve of her breast, so lovingly cupped in her other hand, as only such a perfect orb should be cupped. Then that rod in his pants would spring to life. He would put his hand in his pocket to try to shove it down out of sight so that Frenchy, who sat next to him, wouldn’t notice what was happening to him. But Frenchy did, and whispered to him for Christ’s sake to quit flogging it during study period.
He had no defense against that, because he was a flogger; he had discovered the delights of flogging several months earlier, and he flogged it at night, thinking about Joanne Fensler’s breasts as he did.
His complexion deteriorated at about the same time, which was sheer bad luck: a poor complexion was considered to be the result of excessive flogging. He would go upstairs to the bathroom and look at himself in the mirror, and the evidence would be there all over his face. He bought a special cake of soap he had seen advertised in a film magazine, but it didn’t help. He knew, even as he used it, that it wouldn’t, because he couldn’t stop flogging.
“It did not occur to you that the other boys were masturbating?”
“No. I never talked to them. I thought they didn’t.”
“Your father never spoke to you?”
“No.”
“How long did you feel guilty about masturbating?”
“I still do.”
“About the memory of masturbation or because you still masturbate?”
“Both.”
That was true. When he quit drinking and chasing women in bars, his health improved and his sexual appetite with it. But with Fran gone, he had no outlet, so what did he do? What he did was discuss with himself while waiting for the departure of Hennerkop’s previous patient (a little wisp of a frightened blonde; maybe she had just got through confessing to Hennerkop that she masturbated at night because she had no man to do it for her and maybe he could be doing her a few favors, but he avoided her eye when she came out and she avoided his, and the two of them never exchanged a meaningful look or word)—discuss with himself whether he should say to Hennerkop when it was his turn to go in:
“By the way, I jerked off again last night.” Fred the Flogger still.
Instead, he talked more about the island. He talked so much about it that it finally got to Hennerkop.
“You wish to talk again about that?”
“I thought I was supposed to talk about what I was thinking about.”
Silence.
“I think about that island a lot.”
Silence.
“It’s the only decent thing I have to think about.”
Silence.
“What do you want me to talk about? I’ve told you everything I can about Julia and Fran. I’m sick of them, sick of them both. I’m sick of telling you I felt inferior at school and college and still do. I’m sick of telling you how lonely I am.”
Silence.
“What do you want me to say? What about that girl who just left. What does she talk about? If you really want to know what I’ve been thinking about, I’ve been thinking if on Monday, instead of her leaving, you left.”
Silence.
“If I got her alone in here on Monday, I’d—”
Silence.
“Say something, for Christ’s sake.”
“You would do what?”
“Screw her. Bang her. What the hell do you think?”
Silence.
“Fuck her.” Oh, Jesus. He was shouting and crying at the same time.
“This is better than islands.”
“Hold her.” Oh, God. Feel her body. Feel somebody’s body. Even Hennerkop’s. Once again he had that extraordinary impulse to cling to him.
“You feel desire for me?”
“No. No. I just—”
“You want contact?”
“I’m all alone.”
That was a rough session. At the end he was rubber-legged from sobbing, and he asked Hennerkop if he would go across the street and have a cup of coffee with him while he pulled himself together. Hennerkop did, and as they sat facing each other over a Formica table, he really looked at Hennerkop for the first time. Out of his office he became a man, a neat man with a small neat beard and tired eyes. No longer the remote disembodied question machine, but a man who probably had troubles of his own.
