Part 5 (1/2)

In the blue shoe box on the card table they would find my priceless files. I had written all my data about today's suspect, drawn his face several times from several angles, and filed it all under his car's license number. When the police needed it, it was ready.

Privately I thought the reference librarian at the Homewood Library was soft in the head. The week before, she had handed me, in broad daylight, the book that contained the key to Morse code. Without a word, she watched me copy it, pocket the paper, and leave.

I knew how to keep a code secret, if she didn't. At home I memorized Morse code promptly, and burned the paper.

I had read the library's collection of popular forensic medicine, its many books about Scotland Yard and the FBI, a dull biography of J. Edgar Hoover, and its Sherlock Holmes. I knew I was not alone in knowing Morse code. The FBI knew it, Scotland Yard knew it, and every sparks in the navy knew it. I read everything I could get about ham radios. All I needed was a receiver. I could listen in on troop maneuvers, intelligence reports, and disasters at sea. And I could rescue other hams from calamity, to which, as a cla.s.s, they seemed remarkably p.r.o.ne.

I knew that police artists made composite drawings of criminal suspects. Witnesses to crimes selected, from a varied a.s.sortment, a stripe of crown hair, a stripe or two of forehead, a stripe of eyes, and so forth. Police artists-of whose ranks I was an oblate-made a drawing that combined these elements; newspapers published the drawings; someone recognized the suspect and called the police.

When Pin Ford and I were running low on suspects, and had run out of things to communicate in Morse code, I sat at my attic table beside the shoe box file and drew a variety of such stripes. I amused myself by combining them into new faces. So G.o.d must sit in heaven, at a card table, fingering a heap of stripes-hairlines, jawlines, brows-and joining them at whim to people a world. I began wondering if the stock of individual faces on earth through all of time is infinite.

My sweetest ambition was to see a drawing of mine on a newspaper's front page: HAS ANYBODY SEEN THIS MAN HAS ANYBODY SEEN THIS MAN? I didn't care about reducing crime, any more than Sherlock Holmes did. I rather wished there were more crime, and closer by. What interested me was the schematic likeness, how recognizable it was, and how startlingly few things you needed to strike a resemblance. You needed only a few major proportions in the head. The soft tissues scarcely mattered; they were merely decorations that children drew. What mattered was the framing of the skull.

And so in that faraway attic, among the boughs of buckeye trees, year after year, I drew. I drew formal, sustained studies of my left hand still on the card table, of my baseball mitt, a saddle shoe. I drew from memory the faces of the people I knew, my own family just downstairs in the great house-oh, but I hated these clumsy drawings, these beloved faces so rigid on the page and lacking in tenderness and irony. (Who could a.n.a.lyze a numb skull when all you cared about was a lively caught glance, the pleased rising of Mother's cheek, the soft amused setting of Amy's lip, Father's imagining eye in its socket?) And I drew from memory the faces of people I saw in the streets. I formed sentences about them as I looked at them, and repeated the sentences to myself as I wandered on.

I wanted to notice everything, as Holmes had, and remember it all, as no one had before. Noticing and remembering were the route to Scotland Yard, where I intended to find my niche. They were also, more urgently, the route to the corner yard on Edgerton Avenue, to life in the house we had left and lost.

Hadn't I already forgotten the floor plan of that house where I had lived for seven years? I could see a terrifying oblong of light bend across a room's corner; I could see my mother talking on the phone in the dark stairwell, and Jo Ann Sheehy skating at night on the iced street, and the broom-closet door opening to reveal-the broom. But who could st.i.tch these ripped remnants together? I could no longer conjure up the face of Walter Milligan, the red-haired Irish boy I had chased up and down a football field-could no longer remember his face because I had neglected to memorize it.

Noticing and remembering everything would trap bright scenes to light and fill the blank and darkening past which was already piling up behind me. The growing size of that blank and ever-darkening past frightened me; it loomed beside me like a hole in the air and battened on sc.r.a.ps of my life I failed to claim. If one day I forgot to notice my life, and be d.a.m.ned grateful for it, the blank cave would suck me up entire.

From now on, I would beat the days into my brain. Every year, every month, I vowed this vow in a different form.

But the new scenes I tried to memorize with the aid of sentences were as elusive and random as the scenes I remembered without effort. They were just as broken, trivial, capsizing, submerged. Instead of a suspect's face I saw red-lighted rain in front of a car's taillight. Instead of the schoolyard recess scene I loved, the dodgeball game I tried to memorize at one moment, and then at another-my friends and I excited and whooping-I saw a coa.r.s.e cement corner, and the cyclone fence above it, and only a flash of dark green school uniforms below. Instead of my sister Molly just starting to walk I saw the smocking on her blue dress, and her stained palm. These were torn and out-of-focus scenes playing on windblown sc.r.a.ps. They dissolved when I tried to inspect them, or dimmed, or slid dizzyingly away, like a s.h.i.+p's stern yawing down the dark lee slope of a wave.

BUT HE SAID UNTO JESUS, And who is my neighbor?

And Jesus answering said, A certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell among thieves.

And he said unto him, Who is my neighbor?

But a certain Samaritan came where he was.

And went to him, and bound up his wounds, and brought him to an inn, and took care of him.

And he said unto him, Which now, thinkest thou, was neighbor unto him that fell among the thieves?

And he said unto him, Who IS IS my neighbor? my neighbor?

And Jesus answering said, A certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell among thieves.

Who IS IS my neighbor? my neighbor?

Then said Jesus unto him, Go, and do thou likewise.

This was my ”Terwilliger bunts one.” This and similar fragments of Biblical language played in my head like a record on which the needle has stuck, played at the back of my mind and moved at the root of my tongue and sounded deep in my ears without surcease. Who is my neighbor?

Every July for four years, Amy and I trotted off to a Presbyterian church camp. It was cheap, wholesome, and nearby. There we were happy, loose with other children in cabins under pines. If our parents had known how pious and low church this camp was, they would have yanked us. We memorized Bible chapters, sang rollicking hymns around the clock, held nightly devotions including extemporaneous prayers, and filed out of the woods to chapel twice on Sundays dressed in white shorts. The faith-filled theology there was only half a step out of a tent; you could still smell the sawdust.

We met all sorts of girls at camp. There were a dozen girls from an orphanage, who had never been adopted. Among these I admired an older girl named Liz-a large-framed, bony girl with dry blond curls and high red cheekbones, who wore a wool lumberjack s.h.i.+rt. Every Sunday night, gathered in our bare old rec hall of a chapel, we children could request a favorite hymn if we could recite a Bible verse. Year after year, big Liz returned unadopted to camp and, Sunday after Sunday, requested ”No One Ever Cared for Me Like Jesus.”

I had a head for religious ideas. They were the first ideas I ever encountered. They made other ideas seem mean.

For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul? And lose his own soul? And lose his own soul? Know ye that the Lord he is G.o.d: it is he that hath made us, and not we ourselves; we are his people, and the sheep of his pasture. Arise, and take up thy bed, and walk. And he said unto him, WHO IS MY NEIGHBOR WHO IS MY NEIGHBOR?

Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord? or who shall stand in his holy place? He that hath clean hands, and a pure heart; who hath not lifted up his soul unto vanity, nor sworn deceitfully.

The earth is the Lord's, and the fulness thereof; the world, and they that dwell therein. The heavens declare the glory of G.o.d; and the firmament sheweth his handywork. Verily I say unto you, that one of you shall betray me.

Every summer we memorized these things at camp. Every Sunday in Pittsburgh we heard these things in Sunday school. Every Thursday we studied these things, and memorized them, too (strictly as literature, they said), at school. I had miles of Bible in memory: some perforce, but most by hap, like the words to songs. There was no corner of my brain where you couldn't find, among the files of clothing labels and heaps of rocks, among the swarms of protozoans and shelves of novels, whole tapes and snarls and reels of Bible. Later, before I left Pittsburgh for college, I would write several poems in deliberate imitation of its sounds, those repeated feminine endings followed by thumps, or those long hard beats followed by softness. Selah.

The Bible's was an unlikely, movie-set world alongside our world. Light-shot and translucent in the pallid Sunday-school watercolors on the walls, stormy and opaque in the dense and staggering texts they read us placidly, sweet-mouthed and earnest, week after week, this world interleaved our waking world like dream.

The adult members of society adverted to the Bible unreasonably often. What arcana! Why did they spread this scandalous doc.u.ment before our eyes? If they had read it, I thought, they would have hid it. They didn't recognize the vivid danger that we would, through repeated exposure, catch a case of its wild opposition to their world. Instead they bade us study great chunks of it, and think about those chunks, and commit them to memory, and ignore them. By dipping us children in the Bible so often, they hoped, I think, to give our lives a serious tint, and to provide us with quaintly magnificent s.n.a.t.c.hes of prayer to produce as charms while, say, being mugged for our cash or jewels.

In Sunday school at the Shadyside Presbyterian Church, the handsome father of rascal Jack from dancing school, himself a vice-president of Jones & Laughlin, whose wife was famous at the country club for her tan, held a birch pointer in his long fingers and shyly tapped the hanging paper map, shyly because he could see we weren't listening. Who would listen to this? Why on earth were we here? There in blue and yellow and green were Galilee, Samaria itself, and Judaea, he said-and I pretended to pay attention as a courtesy-the Sea of Galilee, the river Jordan, and the Dead Sea. I saw on the hanging map the coasts of Judaea by the far side of Jordan, on whose unimaginable sh.o.r.es the pastel Christ had maybe uttered such cruel, stiff, thrilling words: Sell whatsoever thou hast.

James and John, the sons of Zebedee, he made them fishers of men. And he came to the Lake of Gennesaret, and he came to Capernaum. And he withdrew in a boat. And a certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho. See it here on the map? Down. He went down, and fell among thieves.

And the swine jumped over the cliff.

And the voice cried, Samuel, Samuel. And the wakened boy Samuel answered, Here am I. And at last he said, Speak.

Hear O Israel, the Lord is one.

And Peter said, I know him not; I know him not; I know him not. And the rich young ruler said, What must I do? And the woman wiped his feet with her hair. And he said, Who touched me?

And he said, Verily, verily, verily, verily; life is not a dream. Let this cup pa.s.s from me. If it be thy will, of course, only if it be thy will.

I GOT MY ROCK COLLECTION GOT MY ROCK COLLECTION from our grandparents' paper boy. He handed it to me in three heavy grocery bags; he said he had no time for a rock collection. Amy and I visited Oma and Company every Friday; while Mary cooked dinner, I roamed their solemn neighborhood, where our family would, as it happened, soon live ourselves. The indigenous children kept mum inside their stone houses; the paper boy-having pedaled his thick black bike, plus rocks, up from an Italian neighborhood down the hill-was the only sign of life. from our grandparents' paper boy. He handed it to me in three heavy grocery bags; he said he had no time for a rock collection. Amy and I visited Oma and Company every Friday; while Mary cooked dinner, I roamed their solemn neighborhood, where our family would, as it happened, soon live ourselves. The indigenous children kept mum inside their stone houses; the paper boy-having pedaled his thick black bike, plus rocks, up from an Italian neighborhood down the hill-was the only sign of life.

The paper boy got the rock collection from a solitary old man named Downey, who until recently had lived just up the street from my grandparents. Mr. Downey had collected the rocks from all over. He had given them to the paper boy, in the grocery bags, explaining that he knew no one else. Then he had died. The paper boy, who was kind but very busy, did not remember the names of any of the rocks except the stalact.i.tes; he recalled, not helpfully, that Mr. Downey had found them in a cave. The stalact.i.tes were sorry-looking at their broken ends: sharp, yellow, and hollow, like fallen deciduous teeth.

Now I had these rocks. They were yellow, green, blue, and red. Most were the size of half-bricks. One small white wafer had blue stone stars. Some were k.n.o.bby, some grainy, some slick. There was a s.h.i.+ning brown mineral the color of shoe polish; its cubed crystals made a scratchy chunk. There was a rusty cl.u.s.ter of petrified roses. There was a frozen froth of platinum bubbles. It was a safe bet all these rocks had names.

From the Homewood Library's children's books I could learn only the vaguest, overamazed stories of ”the earth's crust,” which didn't interest me. What were all these yellow and blue rocks in my room, and why did I never find any rocks so various and sharp? From library adult books I got the true dope, and it was a long story, which involved me in a project less like bird-watching or stamp collecting than like life in a forensic laboratory. The books taught me to identify the rocks. They also lent me a vision of things, and informed me about a bizarre set of people.

You got Frederick H. Pough's Field Guide to Rocks and Minerals Field Guide to Rocks and Minerals. Using this and other books, you identified your rocks one by one, keying them out as you key out plants with Gray's Manual Manual, through a series of diagnostic tests.

You determined, for instance, where your rock fit on Mohs' scale of hardness. Mr. Mohs (Herr Mohs, actually) had devised a series of homespun tests for rock hardness, much as Mr. Beaufort had dreamed up homespun tests for wind force. Does smoke rise straight from the chimney? The wind is not blowing. Is your house falling over? It's blowing force ten. Number one on Mohs' scale was soft rock, to wit, talc. Can you crumble it in your fingers? It's soft. What you have there is talc.u.m powder. Can it scratch a fingernail, a copper penny, a pane of gla.s.s, and a knife blade? It's quartz. You can scratch quartz with topaz, ruby, and diamond. If it makes your diamond saw clog, it's a meteorite.

You subjected your rocks to scratch tests. You procured a piece of bathroom tile (always, in the books, hexagonal, such as you find in old New York bathrooms and nowhere else) and stroked your rock across its unglazed underside. What color was the streak?

Yellow pyrite drew a black streak, black limonite drew a yellow streak, and black hemat.i.te drew a red streak. (Some minerals, Pough explained, to my mystification, are ”not truly black...but only look so.”) The streaks were brilliant pigments, richer than crayon strokes, deeper than pastel strokes; they were powdery pure pigments bright as grease paint. It was a wonder the earth wasn't streaked like a Van Gogh landscape, and all the people streaked like warpath Indians.

You performed other testing marvels on your rocks-at least, the people in the books did. They dripped acid on them; they shone ultraviolet lights on them; they split them, sawed them, and set them on fire (diamond ”burns easily”). They smelled and tasted them. Cracked a.r.s.enic smells like garlic. Epsomite is bitter, halotrichite tastes like ink, soda niter ”tastes cooling.” Those ardent mineralogists who licked their chrysocolla specimens found that their tongues got stuck.

During these tests, the rocks behaved with scarcely less vigor than the scientists. Borax ”swells into great 'worms' as it melts, and finally shrinks to almost nothing.” Other minerals ”may send up little horns.” Some change color when you heat them, or glow, or melt, burn, dissolve, or turn magnetic. Some fly apart (decrepitate). If you should happen to place a hunk of gummite on film, it will take its own picture.

At the end of all these tests, especially if you knew where you found your rocks, you could learn what you had in the paper bags. Or you could, as I did, read the texts' mineral descriptions a thousand times until you hit on something that sounded plausible. You could also go directly to the answers by studying the labeled rocks for sale at the Carnegie Museum shop.