The Fortress of Solitude Read online

  Downstairs was another problem entirely. His mother’s spaces—the parlor full of her books and records, the kitchen where she cooked food and laughed and argued on the phone, her table full of newspapers and cigarettes and wineglasses—were for Dylan full of unpredictability and unrest, like his mother herself. Mornings she was gone to Schermerhorn Street where she worked. Then Dylan could dwell in the downstairs like a ghost, curling over his own books or in a sun-dazzled nap on the couch, eating leftovers from the fridge or spoonfuls of dry cocoa powder directly from the tin so that his mouth became thick with a clay of cocoa, examining the half-finished crossword on the table, running his Matchbox car, #11, through the ashtrays or around the rim of the pot that housed the gigantic jade plant, which with its thick, rubbery, treelike limbs was another world for Dylan’s specklike self to adventure in and be lost. Then, always before he could compose himself or decide what he wanted from her, Rachel Ebdus would be home, and Dylan would discover that he did not control his mother. Dylan’s solitude which his father left unbruised his mother burst like a grape. She might clutch him and with fingers kneading his skull through his hair say, “You’re so beautiful, so beautiful, you’re such a beautiful boy” or just as likely sit apart from him smoking a cigarette and say, “Where did you come from? Why are you here? Why am I here?” or “You know, precious child, that your father is insane.” Frequently she would show him a magazine with a picture labeled CAN YOU DRAW SPARKY? and say, “That would be easy for you, if you wanted you could win this contest.” When Rachel wanted to fry an egg she’d ask Dylan to stand beside her, then crack the egg on his head and hurry it into the frying pan before it spilled. He’d rub his head, half hurt, half in love. She played him Beatles records, Sergeant Pepper, Let It Be, then asked which was his favorite Beatle.

  “Ringo.”

  “Children like Ringo,” she told him. “Boys do. Girls like Paul. He’s sexy. You’ll understand.”

  She might be crying or laughing or cleaning up a broken dish or clipping the nails of the cats who lived in the backyard, the two who’d stayed from the litter downstairs and had grown and now killed birds regularly among the bricks and vines. “See,” she’d say, squeezing the cat’s paw to extend its claws, “you can’t clip them too close, there’s a blood vessel there, they’ll bleed to death.” She was wild with information he couldn’t yet use: Nixon was a criminal, the Dodgers moved to California, Chinese food gives you a headache, Muhammad Ali resisted the war and went to jail, Hitchcock’s British films were better than his American ones, circumcision was unnecessary but women preferred it. She was too full for the house, had to vent herself constantly into the telephone, and too full for Dylan who instead worked Rachel’s margins, dodging her main force to dip sidelong into what he could make sense of. He might creep downstairs to slink at her shelves, in the shadows, under the nudes. There he could pretend to consider her books— Tropic of Cancer, Kon-Tiki, Letting Go, Games People Play —his eyes blurring while he eavesdropped on her calls, calls,“. . . he’s upstairs . . . California never mattered . . . paying all the bills . . . said the texture of the mushrooms reminded me of something and he turned bright red . . . playing that Clapton record at four in the morning . . . completely lost my French . . .” Alternately, Dylan tiptoed close under the cover of Rachel’s monologue, thinking it was another phone call, to find someone seated at her table instead, drinking iced tea, sharing Rachel’s ashtray, laughing, listening, detecting Dylan’s footfalls which Rachel had ignored.

  “There he is,” they’d say, as if Dylan were always the topic just abandoned.

  Then he was beckoned to the table to be met. Dylan would recall the visitors only as Rachel described them later, to Abraham at dinner: the not-brilliant folksinger who’d opened for Bobby Dylan once and wouldn’t let you forget it, the horny yippie who faced prosecution for stuffing subway turnstiles with slugs, the rich homosexual who collected art but wouldn’t buy one of Abraham’s nudes because they were women, the radical black minister from Atlantic Avenue who had to scrutinize everyone new in the neighborhood, the old boyfriend who now worked as a piano tuner at Carnegie Hall but might join the Peace Corps to keep out of Vietnam, the Gurdjieff-quoting English couple on their way to bicycle across Mexico, the woman from the Brooklyn Heights consciousness-raising group who just couldn’t believe they’d bought on Dean Street. So many of them, all reaching for Dylan’s head to muss his hair and ask why Rachel let it grow into his eyes, grow to his shoulders. Dylan looked like a girl—that was agreed on by pretty much everyone.

  Then—and this was finally always the essential problem with floating downstairs—Rachel would stir from her chair, cigarette in her fingers, and usher Dylan to the front door, point out the children playing on the sidewalk, insist that he join them. Rachel had a program, a plan. She had grown up a Brooklyn street kid and so would Dylan. And so she’d eject him from the first of his two worlds, the house, into the second. The outside, the block. Dean Street.

  The second world was an arrangement of zones in slate, and the peeling painted fronts of the row houses—pink, white, pale green, various tones of red and blue, always giving way to the brick underneath—those were the flags of undiscovered realms which lay behind and probably determined the system of slate zones. As far as Dylan could tell no kid ever went into another’s home. They didn’t talk about their parents either. Dylan knew nothing else to talk about, and so drifted silently into the group of children, who seemed to understand this, and vaguely parted their ranks to make room for him. Maybe every kid had drifted in this way.

  Nevins and Bond Streets, which bracketed the block at either end, were vents into the unknown, routes to the housing projects down on Wyckoff Street. Anyway, the Puerto Rican men in front of the bodega on Nevins owned the corner. Another group, black men mostly, lingered in the doorway of a rooming house between the Ebduses’ and Isabel Vendle’s, and they would shoo away the ball-playing boys, yelling at them to watch out for the windshield of a car forever parked in front of the rooming house, a Stingray, which one Puerto Rican man with a waxed mustache frequently polished and rarely drove. Finally, a mean black man who glared but never spoke broomed the slate and scissored weeds in front of two houses close to Bond Street. So the children of Dean Street instinctively bunched in the middle of the block.

  Henry was a black kid with a younger brother, Earl, and a front yard which was paved flat instead of a plot of ruined or halfheartedly gardened ground. The low fence dividing Henry’s paved housefront from the slate of the sidewalk was stone as well, poured cement. Henry was three years older than Dylan. His stoop and yard formed the meeting point, the base of operations. Older boys from farther down the block would arrive and choose sides. Principally Davey and Alberto from across the street and near the corner, from the house which overflowed with cousins and whose stoop was for teenagers smoking. They’d arrive arms swinging, bouncing a new spaldeen. They’d buy a strawberry Yoo-Hoo and share it and give Henry or Henry’s friend Lonnie the cap for skully. Dylan sat with Earl on Henry’s stoop and watched. Marilla’s fiefdom of black girls was across the street. Dylan never went there after the first time, but words crossed Dean Street between Marilla’s yard and Henry’s, and the girls sometimes crossed too. Henry’s yard was the center and Henry was the center. Henry always chose the game.

  Two doors from Henry’s was the abandoned house. It wore cinderblock bandages over the windows and doorway like a mummy with blanked eyes and stilled howling mouth, and had a blasted yard with no fence or gate. The stoop was barren too, no rail. Possibly someone had taken the ironwork for scrap. The mummy house was a flat surface with no windows, so it made a high wall for wallball, a game where a spaldeen was bounced high against the wall by a thrower and caught by a catcher standing in the field of the street, zipping between cars to make the catch.

  A spaldeen fit a hand perfectly and often seemed to be magnetized there. Henry and Davey in particular seemed only to have to lope a step or two and raise
their hand to have a ball appear in their palms. A shot winged off the third floor of the abandoned house flew out the farthest, and one which cleared the gates on the opposite side of the street was a home run. Henry seemed able to do this at will and the fact that he didn’t each time was mysterious. Henry could err too, throw too high and roof a spaldeen, and then the groan would go out to buy another, and pocket change was collected. “That’s how many up there by now?” mused Alberto one day. “If I could get up there I’d be throwing them down all day.”

  Dylan and Earl would be sent to visit the bodega and say the pregnant word, spaldeen, and Old Ramirez would supply another one suspiciously, resenting the business. Dylan would fondle the newborn pink spaldeen but surrender it instantly to Henry, and likely not touch it again until it was scuffed and enervated, bounced out from a thousand angled hurls. That was if Dylan touched it again at all. His chance came between games, the airy transitions when all arms unexplainedly dropped and someone asked for a suck of someone else’s Yoo-Hoo and someone else turned their T-shirt inside out stretched over their elbows, to the laughter of the girls. The spaldeen would roll inert to the gutter and Dylan could retrieve it and marvel at its destruction. Now it deserved roofing. Maybe Henry had a system, like an umpire taking baseballs out of circulation.

  The stoop of the abandoned house was also a proscenium stage for secrets, hidden in plain sight in the middle of the block. The broken slate in front of the abandoned house was thirty feet of no-man’s-land. Dean Street’s trees bunched, like the kids, in the center of the block. They seemed particularly inclined to cover the abandoned house in dappled shade, blobs of light like those thrown by the backyard ailanthus into Dylan’s bedroom, and to muffle the sound of parents calling kids’ names in for dinner into distant phenomena, like birds’ cries. Dylan walked his side of Dean with his head lowered and memorized the slate, could say when he was in front of Henry’s or the abandoned house without glancing up, just by the shapes at his feet, the long tilted slabs or the one sticking-up moonlike shape or the patch of concrete or the shattered pothole which always filled with water after those summer thunderstorms which came and instantly broke the humid afternoons into dark, electrified pieces.

  Wallball, stickball, stoopball, touch. Henry and Lonnie played Alberto and Davey most afternoons, touch in the street, Puerto Rican against black, two-man football, screaming for a long catch in the stolen time between passing cars and the Dean Street bus. The bus stopped the game the longest, the players pressed impatiently against the doors of parked cars to make room, waving the bus on, faster, faster, go. Don’t be afraid of hitting us, they waved at the drivers. Just go, damn, don’t watch us, we watch ourselves.

  One day Henry slapped the side of the bus hard with his palms, then lay flat in the street as though hit. The big bus ground to a halt and stood pulsing in the middle of the block, passengers craning heads to peer open-mouthed through the windows while the driver stepped out to see. Then Henry stood and laughed and ran, freakily fast, feet kicking back like a cartoon, and disappeared around the corner. Lonnie and Alberto laughed at the driver and then pointed down the block. “It wasn’t me, man,” said Lonnie, still laughing, spreading his hands wide in innocence. “Fuck you want me to do? I don’t even know the guy, he’s a crazy kid from the projects.” This lie was told in the street in front of Henry’s yard, his home. But the projects explained pretty much anything, so the driver shook his head and got back in the bus. Dylan watched.

  The girls might play tag. There was something faintly regrettable and unmanly about tag but if the girls played Henry and Lonnie played too, and then Dylan and Earl were slipped into the circle of tapped feet—Eeny, meeny, miney, Moe, my-mother-says-to-pick-the-very-next-one. You might be It. As It Dylan floundered madly and sometimes heard himself yell. It made him a little yellish, he couldn’t say why. Nobody cared, everybody yelled sometimes seemed to be the verdict. Games dissolved mysteriously, groups bunched, It split into two, a boy chased a girl to the corner and out of the game. Subjects of focus changed like the angle of light. A kid might have a bunch of baseball cards one day, there was no explanation. Potential skully caps were collected, the need for wax discussed, but skully was never played. Maybe nobody knew how. Isabel Vendle looked out her window. The men on the corner arranged clacking dominoes, the fish store on Nevins Street was full of sawdust, a kid would come up from the projects and pierce the privacy of the Dean Street kids and everyone would be mysteriously jangled. Whole days were mysterious, and then the sun went down.

  Dylan didn’t recall giving out his name but everyone knew it and nobody cared what it meant. They might sometimes bother to mention that he looked like a girl but it wasn’t apparently his fault. He couldn’t throw or catch but that was just too bad. Not everyone could was the general drift. So Dylan communed with the spaldeen in distaff moments, when it went dribbling to the curb or was punched down the street by the fender of a passing car. Dylan was pleased to fetch it then for the older boys who stood aggrieved, shaking their heads. The ball might be swept nearly to Nevins Street, to the bodega, it might be stopped by one of the grizzled domino players on the crates who’d peruse it briefly before turning it over. The spaldeen was always scarred from its encounter. “Roof it, Henry,” Dylan would whisper as he ran it back, whisper it to himself, but to the ball too, an incantation. Sometimes roofing it was the very next thing Henry would do. Then instead of calling for a new spaldeen the older boys would abruptly slink off, to hang on Alberto’s gate at the other end of the block and bathe in innuendoes and flicked cigarette butts from the teenagers on the stoop there. The teenagers were waiting for night. Dylan stuck to Henry’s concrete fence, the white kid. He could hear Rachel call from there, beyond he wasn’t so sure. From Henry’s and the abandoned house to his own Dylan knew the slate precisely.

  The boy lingered in the study and paged through Isabel’s photo albums while the mother sat on the back terrace, smoking. Isabel watched a squirrel ribbon the telephone pole, begin to scurry across the fence top. The squirrel moved as an oscillating sequence of humps, tail and spine bunching in counterpoint. Some humped things are elegant, Isabel mused, thinking of her own shape.

  Inside, an Italian plasterer reshaped a florette on the parlor ceiling, sweating atop a ladder in the corner by the high front window. The boy at Isabel’s table flapped the laden pages, absorbed as if he were reading.

  The boy was humped too, over the book. More a hedgehog than a squirrel, Isabel decided.

  “Can you get any flavor out of this?” said Isabel to the young mother, frowning.

  “Sure,” said Rachel. She hadn’t extinguished her cigarette to accept the beaded glass of ice and soda. The smoke drifted into the August air unstirred.

  “For all of me that’s dying my tongue is dying soonest.”

  “Maybe put lemon in it,” Rachel suggested.

  “I put lemon in my soup. I can’t also put it in my soda. Take the bottle with you when you go. I should drink formaldehyde.”

  Rachel Ebdus ignored the remark. She was unshockable, a bad sign if Isabel was looking. The young mother leaned back in her chair perilously, cigarette between fingers on a hand propped over her shoulder. Her black unbrushed hair was madness. Isabel pictured it on fire on her patio in the deafened afternoon.

  The man on the ladder gathered excess with his blade and allowed it to drip heavily to the butcher paper on the parlor floor, which crackled as it accepted the weight.

  The boy’s intensity, his gaze, might be wearing the gloss off her old photographs. He hadn’t turned a page for a whole minute. He remained curled around the album as Isabel was curled involuntarily around her whole self.

  Isabel saw that Rachel Ebdus watched the plasterer. “The old art lives in him,” she told the younger woman. “He drinks beer on his breaks and talks like John Garfield, but look at the ceiling.”

  “It’s beautiful.”

  “He says his father taught him. He’s only bringing out the beauty
which was hiding. He’s an instrument of the ceiling. He doesn’t need to understand.”

  Isabel felt irritation with herself or Rachel Ebdus, she wasn’t sure which. She hadn’t brought the image entirely into the light: that though mute, the house conveyed a language of itself, as the plasterer carried forward his father’s trade.

  “He’s got a great ass,” said Rachel.

  Outside, the squirrel shrieked.

  Isabel sighed. She actually craved one of the woman’s cigarettes. Was it possible to begin smoking at seventy-three? Isabel thought she might like to try. Or perhaps she was only impatient with her own inability to fathom anything about Rachel Ebdus besides the woman’s insatiability. And the cigarettes lay on the ironwork grille of Isabel’s patio table within a hand’s reach, whereas the plasterer’s ass was in every sense less accessible.

  “If it’s in any way a question of money—” Isabel began, surprising herself by getting to the point.

  “No, it isn’t,” said Rachel Ebdus, smiling.

  “I don’t want to embarrass you. Both Packer and the Friends School have scholarship possibilities. I don’t know about Saint Ann’s. But I would also be glad to help.”

  “It isn’t about money. I believe in public school. I went to public school.”

  “That’s idealistic indeed. I do think you’ll find that all his friends will be at one or another of the private schools.”

  “Dylan has friends on the block. I doubt they’re going to Brooklyn Friends or Packer.”