“Not Normallissimo” He tore you down and aggrandized the blind deaf and dumb. A masterful sadist. You were in New York again over one school holiday or another. It was warm and humid, I remember people mopping their brows with immense handkerchiefs, the mirror shimmer of the silver ice bucket, the relief of the air-conditioning and found yourself at a party surrounded by two unfamiliar familiars, the two deaf men: your cousin Heschel Levy and his pal Isaac Lark. They were both wildly friendly toward you, animated and gesticulating. Then the slender, quiet, saint-like, blind Wilhelm Lark appeared at the edge of the circle. He no sooner touched your hand than he said, (quietly), “Mark.” I liked the way my harsh name sounded on his lips. He quieted the consonant. “How could you tell it was me?” “I can tell.” “But I haven’t seen you for a few years...” at what must have been a gathering of the Lark clan. Wilhelm smiled. He had heard skeptical pagans like myself resist the powers of touch before and he would, as before, listen and endure. He would be patient. This was like a rite in which whatever innate goodness you had was confirmed, underscored, by the blessing implicit in the attentions of these three handicapped men. Isaac Lark: salt and pepper hair, tall, dapper, blue blazer, blue striped shirt, gray pleated slacks, red and blue bow tie. Magnetic. You describe him as if a deaf man shouldn’t be able to dress himself, when the blind boy, only a few decisive years older than you but “ageless in his wisdom,” according to your Dad, was the one who might have had a problem but settled on a uniform, blue blazer, gray wool slacks, blue and red striped tie. Your father got wind of your presence at the party. “I heard about it all,” he said. “About what?” “Everything. I got the lowdown.” “From whom?” “I have informants. But I can assure you that Wilhelm Lark thinks very highly of you.” “I like him too.” “What’s not to like?” I pretended not to hear his barbed question and continued. “Was he born blind? Or did he become blind? How does he live? Does he live with someone?” “What do you think?” And then my father couldn’t resist saying, in the hushed tones he reserved for those who were truly great: “Have you ever heard him play the piano?” Anyone who could play an instrument was tops in my father’s book. His second wife would replicate his sacred murmur when she would draw me aside and tell of how overcome she was when my father played the organ for her once before they were married. Why wouldn’t he consent to play the organ for me? Just once. “Your father doesn’t like showing off. He’s a deeply humble man.” Remarks like this always sent my mind spinning. Why couldn’t he do it just to do it? I had endured enough hours with that silent organ brooding in the alcove of the spacious, gloomy rent-controlled apartment with its tenacious splash of blood on the rug that hung on long after his encounter with the edge of a new glass coffee table. He and my mother had lived there during the year they were together. He had stayed on alone in the fifteen years between my mother’s departure and his second wife’s insistence that she would marry him but only if they moved. “Come on Dad,” (how awkward it was for me to call him that! How less plangent than “Daddy Sidney”!) “I’d love to hear you play,” and he would look at me as if I were both mad and impudent: how could someone as “musically illiterate” as myself possibly appreciate the quality of his playing, to say nothing of a sonata by Brahms, whose melodious line he favored (and hummed, perhaps unaware that he was doing so). I never doubted he could play the organ, or at the very least perform a few pieces on the organ, but I didn’t find that possibility tantalizing enough to work at breaking down his resistance. I asked him several times, nicely, and when he answered “never mind,” I didn’t ask any more. Even in my youth I could instantly translate the double message he was sending (with telepathy worthy of a Dr. Mabuse) with this reference to Wilhelm’s skill on the piano: (a) a blind man can do what you, with the use of your two eyes, can’t do; (b) you’ll never be able to appreciate me because you haven’t the training to evaluate my musical talents. I didn’t buy into his shtick, but I was utterly at a loss as to why he invested so much energy into making himself appear to be such a mystery, like a hidden treasure it was my job to unearth, making it so “abundantly clear,” to borrow one of the phrases he ran into the ground, that I was such a pathetic dumbkopf, barely worth the effort he put in to “try and explain things” to me. (Whenever I asked “why” he’d roll his eyes and answer, gruffly, “Why? If you don’t get it I can’t help you.” Then he’d mutter “why, why” two or three more times and shake his head. Then a “no, I take it back. You’ll find out why. Someday. Someday you’ll be possessed [his word!] to get to know me, to find out who I really am, you’ll see.”) But then his contempt for “the hicktowns,” where I had lived with Mom and the itinerant Rabbi, the outposts I embraced as we moved further west across America, was limitless: like his anger that, in the end, swallowed him up; like the sea on whose surface he spent every possible waking hour during his bleak end, his headlong plunge from the terrace into the parking lot--the implosion that was the last ten years of his life. You’re sure...? I’m not sure, but it popped out and I don’t want to waffle: it sounds right. Even if it isn’t logical. Interesting. (Sound of someone drawing on a pipe.) He had contempt and you were afflicted with a passion to return, if not to the “hicktown” itself, to a town that could have been its...double. 2 Close to the Ground Lost in a northern suburb of Chicago, I turned onto a street that runs parallel to the lake then meanders toward bluffs where roses surround a shagbark hickory and gorged crows strain the branches. After some whiffs of lilac and after admiring the climbing vines, sparse but tenacious, on the cathedral brick of the houses, I could just glimpse, through the sinuously arching elms--whose topmost leaves sparked when they touched--a trace of blue and the lisp of water on the shore, where white boutiqued rocks, moss and mica-free, formed jetties to keep the waveless waves in tow; leaving so much light dead alewives glittered as they fouled the air, and the muskee's many pointed teeth flared inside its crushed jaw. After a break on the airbrushed cemetery lawn behind gravestones that blocked the lake-wind, I stalked shadows, quickened my stride along the mazy paths and detours and passed off-white-leaning-toward-gray one-story wooden houses, benches creaking on screened-in porches, geraniums in pots, cats blinking at eye-level, plein air sketches of maples, the puppet-dance of their shadows on the house-fronts, the hordes of underrated dandelions whose heads-- once I abandoned the meticulous trowel-- I swatted off gleefully with a my baseball bat.... They were still there: the bicycles turned over in the yards, their spokes interlaced like lovers' limbs preserved in the Vesuvian lava-flow that leveled Naples, the girls playing with blocks in their driveway, the mothers, alone, dragging the long cords of their telephones through the glare of kitchen steel and porcelain, possessed by the need to get somebody on the line; and but for the cries of the construction crew blasting debris out of the gutters with an air gun, and to the south the prairie burning..., this was my childhood--"shot"--on another location.... There are paths in the fog, even in the dark, and they fork, even in the light. 3 It gnaws that I can’t remember what I was doing in New York, how old I was, or why I had gone to the party in the first place. It may have been a party of the deaf...or a Lark family gathering. And it was shocking to see my cousin Heschel on my mother’s side of the family in the room with so many of my father’s friends. I’m guessing that the party was at Isaac Lark’s apartment so that his family (including the blind Wilhelm) and many of his deaf friends were invited. I was in love with one branch of the Lark family, none of whom were there, or appeared too late for it to matter, and consisted of my father’s best friend, his wife, son and daughter. The children were older than me, more or less finishing high school as I was beginning. The son, Joshua, was so kind to me during the summer weeks when I stayed with them that he went so far as to take me along on dates with him so that I shouldn’t get lonely, only he once made the mistake of asking if it was safe for him to back up in a crowded lot and I said “yes,” dreamily, without really looking closely, the word came involuntarily to my lips, and the subsequent crunch of his parents’ finned white Chrysler with spaceship interior against the fender and headlights of a Ford Galaxie ruined my credibility with him. He’d only had his license for a year or so and was still allowed to use the car on a trial basis. He told the story of how he asked me if it was all right to back up whenever he could forever after. From then on he treated me with the same affection but a certain suspicion. And indulged in lighthearted teasing, “and don’t forget to get Mark to tell you if it’s all right to back up,” he’d yell to my father. While I reveled in their attention and affectionate teasing, it irritated me a little that they frequently exchanged glances, winks, and little smiles, when I told them some anecdote about Life With Mother and the “Rabbi” in the West and seemed to take much of what I had to say as if it were a sign, or symptom, of my state of mental unwellness. And Josh would introduce me to one of his friends and say “Mark wanders around Chicago alone with his other ten year old friends, who carry knives and brass knuckles. They’re tough kids, right Mark?” It wasn’t that my mild criminality was out of his imaginative range, it was more that the families in their close-knit orthodox community sent their children to nurturing private schools. I envied the protected life they appeared to lead. (Joshua was forced to revise his opinion as to who I really was over and over again. One time he was driving through Massachusetts where I’d been sent to a summer school near Great Barrington that turned out to be more like reform school. My typically “wild stories” about the place had filtered down to him, and he got out of the car half-smirking in anticipation of the contrast between my reports and what he would encounter. “I hear this is quite a place: where are all the juvenile delinquents?” I thought a quick tour of the dorm was in order. Between the smell of airplane glue, the slicked back hair and tattoos on the biceps of the greasers lifting weights, he could see I was in reality fighting to survive. When we walked back to his car, he wondered aloud, chastened and amazed, “how could your father have sent you to such a place.”)                                  ~ His mother Joanne and I were really close: we shared an antic repartee in each other’s company. If I questioned how she could talk so fast while dishing out pancakes with a cigarette in her mouth without dropping ashes into the food, she’d talk even faster: “you mean like this? Markdoesn’tundertsandhowIcantalksofastwithacigaretteinmymouthand servethefoodwithoutgettingashesinit.” It got to where when we saw each other she’d start with how “Markdoesn’tunderstand...” and we’d both become hysterical with laughter while the others assumed a mask of mild tolerance.                                  ~ The Lark daughter, Felicia, was rarely around, and there was a lot of talk of how she had developed into a “real woman,” how beautiful she had become, so when she appeared for a few days while I was staying with them on the Jersey shore I was curious to witness this fabled transformation from girl to young woman. My father joined us on the weekends. Clearing his throat, to speak with statesman-like sobriety, informed me that Felicia had cast off the [diminutive] nickname by which I had known her all my life. I protested: why couldn’t we call her CiCi and her new friends call her Felicia? Charles’ contempt rolled off me--I would present my question to my pal Joanne: “Felicia is a lovely name, but would she mind if..., since I’ve always been a kid to her..., I still called her CiCi?” “Probably not. It’s not your image of her she’s trying to change. Sometimes parents, especially fathers, and older brothers have a very hard time dealing with their little darlings becoming women...” “Why?” “How old are you anyway now Marko?” “Almost 11.” “It’s common for fathers and daughters to form a powerful bond; but they aren’t always fully aware... and the bond is more powerful than the conscious mind can fully grasp.” “Frederick doesn’t want CiCi to go on dates!” “She’s still his ... little girl ... no matter how permissive he pretends to be.” “Is it the same with you and Josh?” “I hope not. I don’t think so.” “I can’t believe that Josh lets me come along on his dates. I wish he were my brother.” (She pops a cigarette in her mouth.) “He does too. He thinks you’re very deep for your age.” “I’m so happy here. It’s the first time I ever felt what it was like to be part of a fam...ily.” “You mean you don’t like being passed back and forth and back and forth, east and west? It would drive anyone crazy!”                                  ~ Study for Male Gaze She was just seventeen and I, say twelve, when she entered the red room and sat down facing me on the wing chair in the center. Her mother said: "I'm going to have to teach you how to cross your legs in a tight skirt." I shivered for her humiliation. Wanted to see what I'd missed, but what? Then without lowering my head, gazed down. Was there more than the juncture where girdle and stocking interlocked, or the nylon rustling when she dragged one thigh across the other? I didn't feel a whit guilty that I happened to be at the kitchen window of the beach house when this same girl, back from baking on the sand in the midday heat, stepped under the outdoor shower and peeled off her fulsome, unrevealing, one-piece suit to wash the sand off her breasts...: her matter-of-fact quickness couldn’t stop the slow, cold water from caressing each strand of her long thick brown hair, through which, later, after she’d rung it out like a mop, she would drag a wide-toothed comb. What was time? Flames escaped the crown of my head, my heart raced in fear that she’d catch me staring, as if I had lain in wait. Then, in the ritual way of women, she did the other, modest, maddening thing: wrapped her torso in a towel.                                  ~ I will tell you simply why I stayed so long engaged. The two deaf men paid intense attention to me, and they took a long time and great pleasure in explaining how they knew each other. And then, deploying another strategy to keep me listening, tactlessly asked if I knew “your mother used to go out with Gerald Lark? And “did you know that the Larks got your mother and father together in the first place?” The nefarious Gerald, who to her immense disbelief, tried to feel her up on their first date, before she “smacked him good?” “I didn’t know that,” I lied, feigning surprise and refraining from correcting their revisionist history. They dragged me over to see Gerald, who was holding court around the spread, trying to talk and chew a bagel with the same mouth. His lips were smeared with cream cheese. It was like clown makeup that he couldn’t remove with broad, bold strokes of the napkin; without looking in the mirror. The deaf and blind were dressed so elegantly, why was Gerald so altogether linty and wrinkled, why did the cuffs of his pants drag along the carpet? I had always been fascinated by his pockmarked face. The other Larks had jet-black hair and smooth faces and favored black suits. Why had this curse, this grayness, pallor, and disfigured face, been visited on Gerald? “The measles epidemic...and he couldn’t resist picking....” Isaac and Heschel conspired to get Gerald’s attention with a pantomime: they kept pointing at me bringing their hands to their knees and raising them above my head. (None of us could know you reached your full height at fifteen.) I translated as “remember the little boy you...once knew...,” and still in the end had to spell it out for this preoccupied Lark. This was the same Gerald, who appeared old and gray even when he was some ten years younger and my father and I met up with him in Miami and he crumpled a five spot in my palm under the towering palms: an enormous sum by my standards and so I looked forward, if not to seeing him, the ugly, less than personable Gerald, than to saying good-bye and...that moment when he would reach into his wallet, and I stood there, breathless with anticipation at the miraculous substances I could purchase in abundance, gum, baseball cards, Mad, smokes. I would also ponder the following mystery. Why did Gerald give me more money when we said good-bye than my own (by then blind, and he dressed himself, color coordinated, no problem) grandfather Abraham Levy who, in crumpling a couple of singles slyly into my palm as he would a headwaiter or microfilm to an espionage agent, would also urge me not to spend it and, when I was old enough to travel around Manhattan alone, added that I should take the bus and not waste $ on expensive taxis. I didn’t see my cousin Heschel, whom my grandfather respected far more than his phlegmatic brother, (or my “slick” father or my stepfather “who had the nerve to argue” with him) until shortly before he died and the first thing he did after this twenty year hiatus was to launch into the story of the party where, did I remember?, I had talked for hours with him and Isaac. But he couldn’t tell me how I got there.