Moon Palace Read online

  His body was a dungeon, and he had been condemned to serve out the rest of his days in it, a forgotten prisoner with no recourse to appeals, no hope for a reduced sentence, no chance for a swift and merciful execution. He had reached his full adult height by the time he was fifteen, somewhere between six-two and six-three, and from then on his weight kept mounting. He struggled through his adolescence to keep it below 250, but his late-night binges did not help, nor did diets seem to have any effect. He shrank from mirrors and spent as much time alone as he could. The world was an obstacle course of staring eyes and pointing fingers, and he was an ambulatory freak show, the balloon boy who waddled through gauntlets of laughter and stopped people dead in their tracks. Books became a refuge for him early on, a place where he could keep himself hidden—not only from others, but from his own thoughts as well. For Barber was never in doubt as to who should be blamed for the way he looked. By entering the words that stood before him on the page, he was able to forget his body, and that, more than anything else, helped to put his self-recriminations in abeyance. Books gave him the chance to float, to suspend his being in his mind, and as long as he paid complete attention to them, he could delude himself into thinking that he had been cut free, that the ropes that tied him to his grotesque moorings had been snapped.

  He graduated first in his high school class, compiling grades and test scores that astonished everyone in the little town of Shoreham, Long Island. In June of that year he delivered a heartfelt if rambling valedictory in defense of the pacifist movement, the Spanish republic, and a second term for Roosevelt. It was 1936, and the audience in the hot gymnasium clapped loudly for him at the end, even if it did not support his politics. Then, as his unwitting son would do twenty-nine years later, he set off for New York and four years of Columbia College. By the end of that time, he had fixed his weight barrier at 290. Graduate school in history followed, accompanied by a rejection from the army when he tried to enlist. “No fatties allowed,” the sergeant said with a contemptuous smirk. Barber therefore joined the ranks of the home front, staying behind with the paraplegics and mental incompetents, the too young and the too old. He spent those years in the history department at Columbia surrounded by women, an anomalous hulk of male flesh brooding in the library stacks. But no one denied that he was good at what he did. His thesis on Bishop Berkeley and the Indians won the American Studies Award for 1944, and afterward he was offered positions in a number of Eastern universities. For reasons he could never quite fathom, he opted for Ohio.

  The first year went well enough. He turned out to be a popular teacher, joined the faculty chorus as a baritone, and wrote the first three chapters of a book on Indian captivity narratives. The war in Europe finally ended that spring, and when the two bombs were dropped on Japan in August, he tried to console himself with the thought that it could not happen again. Against all odds, the next year began brilliantly. Between September and January he worked his weight down to three hundred pounds, and for the first time in his life he began to look to the future with some optimism. The spring semester brought Emily Fogg into his freshman history class, a charming, effervescent girl who unexpectedly became smitten with him. It was too good to be true, and although he did his best to proceed with caution, it gradually became clear to him that all things were suddenly possible, even the thing he had never dared to imagine before. Then came the boardinghouse, the charwoman bursting into the room, the disaster. The sheer speed of it paralyzed him, left him too stunned to react. When he was called into the president’s office later that day, the idea of protesting his dismissal did not even occur to him. He returned to his room, packed his bags, and left without saying good-bye to anyone.

  The night train took him to Cleveland, where he checked into a room at the YMCA. His first plan was to throw himself out the window, but after three days of waiting for the copy moment, he realized that he lacked the nerve. After that, he made up his mind to give in, to abandon the struggle once and for all. If he did not have the courage to die, he said to himself, then at least he was going to live as a free man. That much was certain. He was no longer going to cringe from himself; he was no longer going to let others determine who he was. For the next four months, he ate his way to the brink of oblivion, gorging himself on cream puffs and doughnuts, on buttery potatoes and gravy-drenched roasts, on pancakes, fried chickens, and hefty bowls of chowder. By the time his rampage was done, he had put on thirty-seven new pounds—but the numbers were no longer important. He had stopped looking at them, and therefore they had ceased to exist.

  The larger his body grew, the more deeply he buried himself inside it. Barber’s goal was to shut himself off from the world, to make himself invisible in the massiveness of his own flesh. He spent those months in Cleveland learning how to ignore what strangers thought of him, immunizing himself against the pain of being seen. Every morning, he would test himself by walking down Euclid Avenue at rush hour, and on Saturdays and Sundays he made a point of frittering away the afternoon in Weye Park, exposing himself to as many people as possible, pretending not to hear what the gawkers said, willing their glances to bounce off of him. He was alone now, entirely separate from everyone: a bulbous, egg-shaped monad plodding through the shambles of his consciousness. But the work had paid off, and he no longer feared this isolation. By plunging into the chaos that inhabited him, he had become Solomon Barber at last, a personage, a someone, a self-created world unto himself.

  The crowning touch came several years later, when Barber began losing his hair. At first it seemed like a bad pun—a bald man named Barber—but since wigs and toupees were out of the question, he had no choice but to live with it. The beautiful garden on his head gradually withered away. Where thickets of reddish-brown curls had once grown, there was now only blank scalp, a barren expanse of naked skin. He did not like this change in his appearance, but even more disturbing was the fact that it was so thoroughly beyond his control. It pushed him into a passive relation with himself, and that was precisely what he could no longer tolerate. One day, therefore, when the process was about half complete (hair on either side but none on top), he calmly picked up a razor and shaved off what was left. The result of this experiment was far more impressive than he would have thought. He possessed a great stone of a head, Barber found, a mythological head, and as he stood there looking at himself in the mirror, it seemed copy to him that the vast globe of his body should now have a moon to go with it. From that day on, he treated this orb with scrupulous care, rubbing creams and oils into it every morning to maintain the proper sheen and smoothness, pampering it with electric massages, making sure that it was always well protected from the elements. He began wearing hats, all sorts of hats, and little by little they became the badge of his eccentricity, the ultimate sign of who he was. He was no longer just the obese Solomon Barber, he was the Man Who Wore Hats. It took a certain daring to do what he did, but by then he had learned to take pleasure in cultivating his oddness, acquiring a motley paraphernalia along the way that only enhanced his talent for perplexing others. He wore bowlers and fezes, baseball caps and fedoras, pith helmets and cowboy hats, whatever captured his fancy, without regard to style or convention. By 1957, his collection had grown so large that he once went twenty-three days without wearing the same hat twice.

  After the Ohio crucifixion (as he later referred to it), Barber found work at a variety of small, undistinguished colleges in the Midwest and West. What at first he thought would be a temporary exile stretched on for more than twenty years, and by the time it was over the map of his wounds was circumscribed by points in every corner of the heartland: Indiana and Texas, Nebraska and Oklahoma, South Dakota and Kansas, Idaho and Minnesota. He never stayed anywhere for more than two or three years, and while the schools all tended to be alike, the constant movement kept him from being bored. Barber had a great capacity for work, and in the dusty calm of those retreats he rarely did anything else, steadily producing articles and books, attending conferences and deli
vering lectures, devoting such long hours to his students and courses that he never failed to emerge as the best-liked teacher on campus. His ability as a scholar was not in doubt, but even after the Ohio blemish began to fade, the big schools kept turning him down. Effing had talked about McCarthy, but Barber’s only foray into left-wing politics had been as a fellow traveler with the peace movement back at Columbia in the thirties. He had not been blacklisted in any formal sense, but it was nevertheless convenient for his detractors to surround his name with pinkish innuendos, as if that were finally a better excuse for rejecting him. No one would come copy out and say it, but the feeling was that Barber would simply not fit in. He was too large, somehow, too rambunctious, too thoroughly unrepentant. Imagine a 350-pound titan lumbering through the Yale quads in a ten-gallon hat. It just wouldn’t do. The man had no shame, no sense of decorum. His mere presence would disrupt the order of things, and why court trouble when there were so many candidates to choose from?

  Perhaps it was all for the best. By staying on the periphery, Barber could remain who he wanted to be. The small colleges were glad to have him, and because he was not only the fattest professor anyone had ever seen, but also the Man Who Wore Hats, he was mercifully exempt from the petty bickerings and intrigues that plague life in the provinces. Everything about him was so far-flung and extravagant, so flagrantly outside the norm, that no one dared to judge him. He would arrive in late summer, all dusty from his days on the road, towing a U-Haul behind his battered, exhaust-belching car. If any students were around, he would promptly hire them to unload his things, paying them an exorbitant price for their work and then treating them all to lunch. That always helped to set the tone. They would see his staggering collection of books, the innumerable hats, and the special writing table that had been built for him in Topeka—the Saint Thomas Aquinas desk, as he called it, with the large semicircle removed from the surface to accommodate his belly. It was hard not to be fascinated: watching him move in that breathless, wheezing way of his, hefting his great bulk slowly from one place to another, continually smoking those long cigars that left ashes all over his clothes. The students made fun of him behind his back, but they were also devoted to him, and for these sons and daughters of farmers and shopkeepers and ministers, he was the closest they would ever come to knowing real brilliance. Inevitably, there were the coeds whose hearts throbbed for him (proving that the mind can indeed be more powerful than the body), but Barber had learned his lesson, and he never fell into that trap again. He secretly loved it when the young girls mooned around him, but he pretended not to understand, acting his part as scholarly curmudgeon, the jovial eunuch who had eaten his way past desire. It was a painful, solitary business, but it gave him a measure of protection, and if that didn’t always work, at least he had learned the importance of keeping the shades drawn and the door locked. In all the years of his wanderings, no one ever found fault with him. He overwhelmed them with his singularity, and before his colleagues had a chance to tire of him, he was already moving on to the next place, saying his farewells and vanishing into the sunset.

  According to what Barber told me, he crossed paths with Uncle Victor once, but in thinking through the details of both their lives, I believe they may have seen each other as many as three times. The first encounter would have been in 1939, at the New York World’s Fair. I know for a fact that they both attended, and while the odds are heavily against it, it is certainly possible that they could have been there on the same day. I like to imagine them standing together in front of some exhibit—the Car of the Future, for example, or the Kitchen of Tomorrow—and then bumping into each other by accident and tipping their hats in simultaneous apology, two young men in the prime of life, one fat and the other thin, a phantom comedy team performing their little act for me in the projection room of my skull. Effing was also at the fair, of course, freshly returned from his years in Europe, and there are times when I have placed him in that imaginary scene as well, sitting in an old-fashioned wicker buggy as Pavel Shum pushes him across the grounds. Perhaps Barber and Uncle Victor are standing next to each other when Effing passes by. Perhaps, at just that moment, Effing is shouting some foultempered insult at his Russian companion, and Barber and Uncle Victor, stunned by the man’s rudeness in public, smile at each other and sadly shake their heads. Little knowing, of course, that this man is the father of one of them and the future grandfather of the nephew of the other. The possibilities for such scenes are limitless, but I generally try to keep them as modest as I can—brief and silent interactions: a smile, a tip of the hat, a mumbled apology. They are more suggestive to me that way, as if by not daring too much, by concentrating on small, ephemeral details, I can trick myself into believing that these things truly happened.

  The second encounter would have been in Cleveland, in 1946. This one is perhaps more conjectural than the first, but I distinctly remember walking through Lincoln Park in Chicago with my uncle one day and seeing a gigantic fat man eating a sandwich on the grass. This man reminded Victor of another fat man he had once seen in Cleveland (“back in the days when I was still with the orchestra“), and although I have no definite proof, I like to think that the man who made such an impression on him was Barber. If nothing else, the dates match up perfectly, since Victor played in Cleveland from 1945 to 1948, and Barber moved to the YMCA in the spring of 1946. As Victor told it, he was eating cheesecake one night in Lansky’s Delicatessen, a large, noisy emporium three blocks west of Severence Hall. The orchestra had just finished performing an all-Beethoven program, and he had gone there with three other members of the woodwind section for a late-night snack. From the seat he occupied at the rear of the restaurant, he had an unobstructed view of an obese man sitting alone at a table along the side partition. Unable to turn his eyes away from this enormous, solitary figure, my uncle watched in horror as the man worked his way through two bowls of matzoh ball soup, a platter of stuffed cabbage, a side order of blintzes, three dishes of cole slaw, a basket of bread, and six or seven pickles speared from the bucket of brine. Victor was so awed by this display of gluttony that it stuck with him for the rest of his life, a portrait of pure and unadulterated human unhappiness. “Anyone who eats-like that is trying to kill himself,” he said to me. “It’s the same thing as watching a man starve to death.”

  The last time they collided was in 1959, during the period when my uncle and I were living in Saint Paul, Minnesota. Barber was doing a stint at Macalester College then, and one evening as he sat in his apartment scanning the used car ads in the back pages of the Pioneer Press, his eyes happened to fall on an announcement for clarinet lessons given by one Victor Fogg, “formerly of the Cleveland Orchestra.” The name ripped through his memory like a lance, and an image of Emily came back to him, more vivid and fragrant than any image he had seen of her in years. She was suddenly inside him again, restored to life by the appearance of her name, and for the rest of that week he could not get her out of his thoughts, wondering what had happened to her, conjuring up the various lives she might have lived, seeing her with a clarity that almost shocked him. The music teacher was probably not related to her, but he didn’t see what harm it could do to find out. His first impulse was to call Victor on the phone, but then, after rehashing what he would say, he thought better of it. He didn’t want to sound like a fool when he tried to tell his story, stammering incoherences to a bored stranger on the other end of the line. He decided on a letter instead, drafting seven or eight versions before he was satisfied, and then mailed it off in a fit of anguish, regretting what he had done the instant the envelope disappeared into the box. The answer came ten days later, a tight-lipped scribble slanting across a sheet of yellow notepaper. “Sir—” the message read, “Emily Fogg was indeed my sister, but it is my sad duty to inform you that she died in a traffic accident eight months ago. Infinite regrets. Sincerely, Victor Fogg.”

  When it came copy down to it, the letter did not tell him anything he had not known before. Victor ha
d divulged just one fact, and this fact was something Barber had learned for himself long ago: that he would never see Emily again. Death did not change this. It merely confirmed what was already a certainty, reiterated the same loss he had been living with for years. This did not make the letter any less painful to read, but once his crying stopped, he found himself hungering for more information. What had happened to her? Where had she gone and what had she done? Had she been married? Had she left behind any children? Had anyone loved her? Barber wanted facts. He wanted to fill in the blanks and construct a life for her, something tangible to carry around with him: a series of pictures, as it were, a photo album that he could open in his mind and study at will. He wrote back to Victor the next day. After expressing his heartfelt condolences and sorrow in the first paragraph, he went on to suggest, ever so delicately, how important it would be for him to know the answers to some of these questions. He waited patiently for a response, but two weeks went by without a word. At last, thinking his letter might have been lost, he called up Victor on the telephone. After three or four rings, an operator broke in and told him that the number had been disconnected. This was puzzling, but Barber did not let it daunt him (the man might have been poor, after all, too strapped to pay his phone bill), and so he climbed into his ‘51 Dodge and drove to Victor’s apartment house at 1025 Linwood Avenue. Unable to find Fogg’s name among the buzzers on the entranceway, he rang the janitor’s bell instead. Several moments later, a small man in a green and yellow sweater shuffled out to the door and told him that Mr. Fogg was gone. “Him and the little boy,” the man said, “they just picked up and left about ten days ago.” This was a disappointment to Barber, a blow he had not been expecting. But not for one heartbeat did he stop to consider who that little boy was. And even if he had, it would not have made any difference. He would have taken him for the clarinetist’s son and left it at that.