Edwin continued to tie his left sneaker. When he had finished he lifted his face, slightly flushed, and said: “I’d like to get in some batting practice.” Frowning he added: “If I can find my bat,” and bent over again.
Now perhaps in my nervousness I had spoken too softly, perhaps I had emitted only a faint whisper, or a hum. Perhaps I had run my words together in a meaningless jabber. Or perhaps Edwin had been concentrating so intensely on those bright white shoelaces of his that the rest of the world had simply turned to dust. Whatever the reason, the effect on me was devastating, it was as if I did not exist, and in my sleepless and overwrought condition it was all I could do to keep from bursting into tears. But the very force of my effort at self-control provided me with the energy to speak again, and in anguish and anger I repeated: “Edwin, I’m going to write your biography.”
Edwin sat up like a shot. And perhaps in my anguish and anger I had spoken more loudly than I knew, for he said: “You don’t have to shout, you know.” He added scornfully: “Anyway, how can you write my biography. I’m not dead.”
“You don’t have to be dead,” I sneered, though as it turned out I was mistaken.
14
IT WAS ONLY A MATTER OF TIME before Edwin’s indifference turned to passionate regard. I do not flatter myself that his change of heart arose from any mere desire to be of assistance to me. To put it bluntly: Edwin was bored. The reader must remember that for a year and five months he had filled his days to overflowing with the lively pursuit of his lovely book; completion was bound to leave a gap. If, in the first flush of victory, he seemed to experience only a sense of release, and returned with delight to the little games and passions of the past, swinging his bat in the chilly back yard, banging away at his Czerny five-finger exercises, playing the hockey game with passionate eagerness, and reading voraciously the trash he favored (glossy baseball magazines full of ugly statistics, vile baseball novels borrowed from the teenage section of the library), nevertheless his shiny new enthusiasm soon began to show a frayed edge of despair. He became afflicted with sudden passions that quickly died. One day he discovered a biography called Thomas Alva Edison: The Wizard of Menlo Park, and spent an entire afternoon turning a corner of the cellar into an inventor’s laboratory; but his enthusiasm exhausted itself in the feverish collection of such treasures as the mortar and pestle from my chemistry set and an old brown mercurochrome bottle from whose dark cap hung a slim glass rod — and besides, he could think of nothing to invent. One day he dashed off a little play for three people based on the classic comic version of Ivanhoe. Karen was Rebecca, Edwin was Ivanhoe, and I was Brian de Bois-Guilbert; and he charged admission to his parents, each of whom had to drop a nickel into a delicately balanced section of vacuum-cleaner pipe that rose from a glass jar. On a vast sheet of brown wrapping paper he invented a simple game consisting of an elaborate winding trail called Paradise Street that led to a distant green Paradise and was divided into hundreds of sections that said GO AHEAD 3 or LOSE ONE TURN or bade you pick a card from one of three different piles; and he even made an enormous die out of red construction paper. He read a book on magic and gave a show, pouring into prepared glasses water that mysteriously turned blue or red (I had lent him my chemistry set) and performing miraculous feats of mind-reading with the aid of his medium, Karen, who transferred to Edwin the whispered numbers of Mrs. Mullhouse by means of an eyeblink code. One Saturday afternoon when Dr. and Mrs. Mullhouse were away, he transformed the entire house into a vast amusement park called EDWIN’S ISLAND, each room a ride: the bathroom was the ticket booth, in which toilet-paper tickets were dispensed; Edwin’s room was the funhouse, in which you could jump over the River of Crocodiles from one moved-out bed to the other or crawl through a tunnel of folding chairs draped in dark blankets; the stairway was a roller coaster, down which you rode on a thick piece of cardboard; the cellar was a spookhouse, in which Edwin was the spook; but Dr. and Mrs. Mullhouse, returning to a living room filled with dusty dishes that had been brought down from the attic for penny-toss (I won the piano), quickly closed down the park. He plunged into schoolwork, making maps of the world whose dotted lines showed the voyages of Vasco de Gama, Ferdinand Magellan, Henry Hudson, Edwin Mullhouse, Bartholomeu Diaz. He became obsessed by word-games, forcing me into long vindictive bouts of Ghost, Geography, Hang Man. But all this energy was nothing but the rock and pitch of an inner dissatisfaction, and by the first week of April, as a sudden fierce snowstorm startled a balmy week of spring, Edwin was already darkening into gloom.
And so I was not excessively surprised when, one snowy afternoon in Edwin’s room, as he paced up and down with his hands in his pockets among piles of old comic books and boxes of old toys, he turned to me suddenly and said: “I know. Let’s play Biography.”
“I don’t know what you,” I began, but he was standing before me, waving his hands about and talking rapidly: “… and I’ll answer them, anything at all, and you can write it all down, we’ll have pictures, maps, everything, wait, I’ll be right back.” And flying out of the room he rushed downstairs, where I heard various slams and clanks, and rushing upstairs he entered with a large pad of ugly yellow paper and one of Dr. Mullhouse’s curving pipes; and thrusting a pencil and the ugly pad at me, and placing the pipe in his mouth, he leaped onto his bed, crossed his legs, folded his arms, and said between clenched teeth: “Mmmready!”
15
RAIN WASHED THE FINAL WINTER AWAY, and warm winds came, like a blossoming of the air, carrying with them an odor of voyages. On the strip of lawn between the pricker hedge and Benjamin Street, the maples put out their dark red final flowers. And as the year changed from black and white to technicolor, Edwin withdrew from the color and the clamor to the dimness and stillness of his beloved room. The bright light hurt his eyes, he said, but I think the reason was rather this, that during the long darkness of the making of Cartoons he had lost the habit of brightness, had created in himself an instinct for darkness. He now did his homework immediately upon coming home from school, and would go out only after dinner, when the sun had set behind the backyard vista of distant trees and pointed rooftops. And I, in order to see him, was forced to do my homework in my own dark corner of the bright blue day. But quickly I grew to look forward to those long evening rambles in the dusk and dark, to those deepening skies that made the pale streetlamps grow brighter and brighter, to those times half-night half-day when the vast advancing east is dark blue shading into black and the small retreating west is pale blue shading into white, and to the warm spring darkness itself. Edwin and I took longer and longer walks, in the nights that grew warmer and warmer; and as we strolled along familiar and less familiar streets in April moonlight, past yellow windows through which we saw lamps and elbows, past dark flickering windows through which we saw blue-gray television screens, over lamplit sidewalks strewn with mown grass, under dark boughs of budding maple and blossoming dogwood, now and again we would happen to step out of the familiar universe into a sudden sharp shock of sweetly scented air, sudden as spilled perfume, piercing as crystal, dark and sweet as the sound of oboes.