Moon Palace Read online

  The clarinet lessons did not go well (my breath was unwilling, my lips impatient), and I soon wormed my way out of them. Baseball proved more compelling to me, and by the time I was eleven I had become one of those skinny American kids who went everywhere with his glove, pounding my copy fist into the pocket a thousand times a day. Baseball no doubt helped me over some hurdles at school, and when I joined the local Little League that first spring, Uncle Victor came to nearly all the games to cheer me on. In July of 1958, however, we moved abruptly to Saint Paul, Minnesota (“a rare opportunity,” said Victor, referring to some job he had been offered to teach music), but by the following year we were back in Chicago. In October, Victor bought a television set and allowed me to stay home from school to watch the White Sox lose the World Series in six games. That was the year of Early Wynn and the go-go Sox, of Wally Moon and his moon-shot home runs. We pulled for Chicago, of course, but we were both secretly glad when the man with the bushy eyebrows hit one out in the last game. With the start of the next season, we went back to rooting for the Cubs—the bumbling, sad-sack Cubs, the team that possessed our souls. Victor was a staunch advocate of daytime baseball, and he saw it as a moral good that the chewing gum king had not succumbed to the perversion of artificial lights. “When I go to a game,” he would say, “the only stars I want to see are the ones on the diamond. It’s a sport for sunshine and wooly sweat. Apollo’s cart hovering at the zenith! The great ball burning in the American sky!” We had lengthy discussions during those years about such men as Ernie Banks, George Altman, and Glen Hobbie. Hobbie was a particular favorite of his, but in keeping with his view of the world, my uncle declared that he would never make it as a pitcher, since his name implied unprofessionalism. Crackpot remarks of this sort were essential to Victor’s brand of humor. Having developed a true fondness for his jokes by then, I understood why they had to be delivered with a straight face.

  Shortly after I turned fourteen, the household population expanded to three. Dora Shamsky, nee Katz, was a stout, mid-fortyish widow with an extravagant head of bleached blond hair and a tightly girdled rump. Since the death of Mr. Shamsky six years before, she had been working as a secretary in the actuarial division of Mid-American Life. Her meeting with Uncle Victor took place in the ballroom of the Featherstone Hotel, where the Moonlight Moods had been on hand to provide musical entertainment for the company’s annual New Year’s Eve bash. After a whirlwind courtship, the couple tied the knot in March. I saw nothing wrong with any of this per se and proudly served as best man at the wedding. But once the dust began to settle, it pained me to notice that my new aunt did not laugh very readily at Victor’s jokes, and I wondered if that might not indicate a certain obtuseness on her part, a lack of mental agility that boded ill for the prospects of the union. I soon learned that there were two Doras. The first was all bustle and get-up-and-go, a gruff, mannish character who stormed about the house with sergeantlike efficiency, a bulwark of brittle good cheer, a know-it-all, a boss. The second Dora was a boozy flirt, a tearful, self-pitying sensualist who tottered around in a pink bathrobe and puked up her binges on the living room floor. Of the two, I much preferred the second, if only because of the tenderness she seemed to show for me then. But Dora in her cups posed a conundrum that I was quite at a loss to untangle, for these collapses of hers made Victor morose and unhappy, and more than anything else in the world, I hated to see my uncle suffer. Victor could put up with the sober, nagging Dora, but her drunkenness brought out a severity and impatience in him that struck me as unnatural, a perversion of his true self. The good and the bad were therefore constantly at war with each other. When Dora was good, Victor was bad; when Dora was bad, Victor was good.

  The good Dora created a bad Victor, and the good Victor returned only when Dora was bad. I remained a prisoner of this infernal machine for more than a year.

  Fortunately, the bus company in Boston had made a generous settlement. By Victor’s calculations, there would be enough money to pay for four years of college, modest living expenses, and something extra to carry me into so-called real life. For the first few years he kept this fund scrupulously intact. He fed me out of his own pocket and was glad to do so, taking pride in his responsibility and showing no inclination to tamper with the sum or any part of it. With Dora now on the scene, however, Victor changed his plan. Withdrawing the interest that had accumulated on the lump, along with certain bits of the something extra, he enrolled me in a private boarding school in New Hampshire, thinking in this way to reverse the effects of his miscalculation. For if Dora had not turned out to be the mother he had been hoping to provide for me, he saw no reason not to look for another solution. Too bad for the something extra, of course, but that could not be helped. When faced with a choice between the now and the later, Victor had always gone with the now, and given that his whole life was bound up in the logic of this impulse, it was only natural that he should opt for the now again.

  I spent three years at Anselm’s Academy for Boys. When I returned home after the second year, Victor and Dora had already come to a parting of the ways, but there did not seem to be any point in switching schools again, and so I went back to New Hampshire when summer vacation was over. Victor’s account of the divorce was fairly muddled, and I could never be sure of what really happened. There was some talk about missing bank accounts and broken dishes, but then a man named George was mentioned, and I wondered if he wasn’t involved in it as well. I did not press my uncle for details, however, since when all was said and done, he seemed more relieved than stricken to be alone again. Victor had survived the marriage wars, but that did not mean he had no wounds to show for it. His appearance was disturbingly rumpled (buttons missing, collars soiled, the cuffs of his pants frayed), and even his jokes had begun to take on a wistful, almost poignant quality. Those signs were bad enough, but more troubling to me were the physical lapses. There were moments when he stumbled as he walked (a mysterious buckling of the knees), knocked into household objects, seemed to forget where he was. I knew that life with Dora had taken its toll, but there must have been more to it than that. Not wanting to increase my alarm, I managed to convince myself that his troubles had less to do with his body than with his state of mind. Perhaps I was copy, but looking back on it now, it is difficult for me to imagine that the symptoms I first saw that summer were not connected to the heart attack that killed him three years later. Victor himself said nothing, but his body was speaking to me in code, and I did not have the wherewithal or the sense to crack it.

  When I returned to Chicago for Christmas vacation, the crisis seemed to have passed. Victor had recovered much of his bounce, and great doings were suddenly afoot. In September, he and Howie Dunn had disbanded the Moonlight Moods and started another group, joining forces with three younger musicians who took over at drums, piano, and saxophone. They called themselves the Moon Men now, and most of their songs were original numbers. Victor wrote the lyrics, Howie composed the music, and all five of them sang, after a fashion. “No more old favorites,” Victor announced to me when I arrived. “No more dance tunes. No more drunken weddings. We’ve quit the rubber chicken circuit for a run at the big time.” There was no question that they had put together an original act, and when I went to see them perform the next night, the songs struck me as a revelation—filled with humor and spirit, a boisterous form of mayhem that mocked everything from politics to love. Victor’s lyrics had a jaunty, dittylike flavor to them, but the underlying tone was almost Swiftian in its effect. Spike Jones meets Schopenhauer, if such a thing is possible. Howie had swung the Moon Men a booking in one of the downtown Chicago clubs, and they wound up performing there every weekend from Thanksgiving to Valentine’s Day. By the time I came back to Chicago after high school graduation, a tour was already in the works, and there was even some talk of cutting a record with a company in Los Angeles. That was how Uncle Victor’s books entered the story. He was going on the road in mid-September, and he didn’t know when he would be bac
k.

  It was late at night, less than a week before I was supposed to leave for New York. Victor was sitting in his chair by the window, working his way through a pack of Raleighs and drinking schnapps from a dime-store tumbler. I was sprawled out on the couch, floating happily in a stupor of bourbon and smoke. We had been talking about nothing in particular for three or four hours, but now the conversation had hit a lull, and each of us was drifting in the silence of his own thoughts. Uncle Victor sucked in a last drag from his cigarette, squinted as the smoke curled up his cheek, and then snuffed out the butt in his favorite ashtray, a souvenir from the 1939 World’s Fair. Studying me with misty affection, he took another sip from his drink, smacked his lips, and let out a deep sigh. “Now we come to the hard part,” he said. “The endings, the farewells, the famous last words. Pulling up stakes, I think they call it in the Westerns. If you don’t hear from me often, Phileas, remember that you’re in my thoughts. I wish I could say I know where I’ll be, but new worlds suddenly beckon to us both, and I doubt there will be many chances for writing letters.” Uncle Victor paused to light another cigarette, and I could see that his hand trembled as he held the match. “No one knows how long it will last,” he continued, “but Howie is very optimistic. The bookings are extensive so far, and no doubt others will follow. Colorado, Arizona, Nevada, California. We’ll be setting a westerly course, plunging into the wilderness. It should be interesting, I think, no matter what comes of it. A bunch of city slickers in the land of cowboys and Indians. But I relish the thought of those open spaces, of playing my music under the desert sky. Who knows if some new truth will not be revealed to me out there?”

  Uncle Victor laughed, as though to undercut the seriousness of this thought. “The point being,” he resumed, “that with so much distance to be covered, I must travel light. Objects will have to be discarded, given away, thrown into the dust. Since it pains me to think of them vanishing forever, I have decided to hand them over to you. Who else can I trust, after all? Who else is there to carry on the tradition? I begin with the books. Yes, yes, all of them. As far as I’m concerned, it couldn’t have come at a better moment. When I counted them this afternoon, there were one thousand four hundred and ninety-two volumes. A propitious number, I think, since it evokes the memory of Columbus’s discovery of America, and the college you’re going to was named after Columbus. Some of these books are big, some are small, some are fat, some are thin—but all of them contain words. If you read those words, perhaps they will help you with your education. No, no, I won’t hear of it. Not one peep of protest. Once you’re settled in New York, I’ll have them shipped to you. I’ll keep the extra copy of Dante, but otherwise you must have them all. After that, there’s the wooden chess set. I’ll keep the magnetic one, but the wood must go with you. Then comes the cigar box with the baseball autographs. We have nearly every Cub of the past two decades, a few stars, and numerous lesser lights from around the league. Matt Batts, Memo Luna, Rip Repulski, Putsy Caballero, Dick Drott. The obscurity of those names alone should make them immortal. After that, I come to various trinkets, doo-dads, odds and ends. My souvenir ashtrays from New York and the Alamo, the Haydn and Mozart recordings I made with the Cleveland Orchestra, the family photo album, the plaque I won as a boy for finishing first in the statewide music competition. That was in 1924, if you can believe it—a long, long time ago. Finally, I want you to have the tweed suit I bought in the Loop a few winters back. I won’t be needing it in the places I’m going to, and it’s made of the finest Scottish wool. I’ve worn it just twice, and if I gave it to the Salvation Army, it would only wind up on the back of some besotted creature from Skid Row. Much better that you should have it. It will give you a certain distinction, and there’s no crime in looking your best, is there? We’ll go to the tailor first thing tomorrow morning and have it altered.

  “That takes care of it, I think. The books, the chess set, the autographs, the miscellaneous, the suit. Now that my kingdom has been disposed of, I feel content. There’s no need for you to look at me like that. I know what I’m doing, and I’m glad to have done it. You’re a good boy, Phileas, and you’ll always be with me, no matter where I am. For the time being, we move off in opposite directions. But sooner or later we’ll meet again, I’m sure of it. Everything works out in the end, you see, everything connects. The nine circles. The nine planets. The nine innings. Our nine lives. Just think of it. The correspondences are infinite. But enough of this blather for one night. The hour grows late, and sleep is calling to us both. Come, give me your hand. Yes, that’s copy, a good firm grip. Like so. And now shake. That’s copy, a shake of farewell. A shake to last us to the end of time.”

  Every week or two, Uncle Victor would send me a postcard. These were generally garish, full-color tourist items: depictions of Rocky Mountain sunsets, publicity shots of roadside motels, cactus plants and rodeos, dude ranches, ghost towns, desert panoramas. Salutations sometimes appeared within the borders of a painted lasso, and once a mule even spoke with a cartoon bubble above his head: Greetings from Silver Gulch. The messages on the back were brief, cryptic scrawls, but I was not hungry for news from my uncle so much as an occasional sign of life. The real pleasure lay in the cards themselves, and the more inane and vulgar they were, the happier I was to get them. I felt that we were sharing some private joke each time I found one in my mailbox, and the very best ones (a picture of an empty restaurant in Reno, a fat woman on horseback in Cheyenne) I even went so far as to tape to the wall above my bed. My roommate understood the empty restaurant, but the horseback rider baffled him. I explained that she bore an uncanny resemblance to my uncle’s ex-wife, Dora. Given the way things happen in the world, I said, there was a good chance that the woman was Dora herself.

  Because Victor did not stay anywhere very long, it was hard for me to answer him. In late October I wrote a nine-page letter about the New York City blackout (I had been trapped in an elevator with two friends), but I did not mail it until January, when the Moon Men began their three-week stint in Tahoe. If I could not write often, I nevertheless managed to stay in spiritual contact with him by wearing the suit. Suits were hardly in fashion for undergraduates back then, but I felt at home in it, and since for all practical purposes I had no other home, I continued to wear it every day, from the beginning of the year to the end. At moments of stress and unhappiness, it was a particular comfort to feel myself swaddled in the warmth of my uncle’s clothes, and there were times when I imagined the suit was actually holding me together, that if I did not wear it my body would fly apart. It functioned as a protective membrane, a second skin that shielded me from the blows of life. Looking back on it now, I realize what a curious figure I must have cut: gaunt, disheveled, intense, a young man clearly out of step with the rest of the world. But the fact was that I had no desire to fit in. If my fellow students pegged me as an oddball, that was not my problem. I was the sublime intellectual, the cantankerous and opinionated future genius, the skulking Malevole who stood apart from the herd. It almost makes me blush to remember the ridiculous poses I struck back then. I was a grotesque amalgam of timidity and arrogance, alternating between long, awkward silences and blazing fits of rambunctiousness. When the mood came upon me, I would spend whole nights in bars, smoking and drinking as though I meant to kill myself, quoting verses from minor sixteenth-century poets, making obscure references in Latin to medieval philosophers, doing everything I could to impress my friends. Eighteen is a terrible age, and while I walked around with the conviction that I was somehow more grown-up than my classmates, the truth was that I had merely found a different way of being young. More than anything else, the suit was the badge of my identity, the emblem of how I wanted others to see me. Objectively considered, there was nothing wrong with the suit. It was a dark greenish tweed with small checks and narrow lapels—a sturdy, well-made article of clothing—but after several months of constant wear, it began to give a haphazard impression, hanging on my skinny frame like some wrinkled
afterthought, a sagging turmoil of wool. What my friends didn’t know, of course, was that I wore it for sentimental reasons. Under my nonconformist posturing, I was also satisfying the desire to have my uncle near me, and the cut of the garment had almost nothing to do with it. If Victor had given me a purple zoot suit, I no doubt would have worn it in the same spirit that I wore the tweed.