Since Camp Unhappy, he has also begun exhibiting an unusual number of unusual symptoms: he has complained about an inability to yawn and sneeze properly; he has remarked about a mysterious “tingling” at the end of his penis; he has complained about not liking how his teeth “line up.” And he has from time to time made unexpected barking noises — leering like a Cheshire, afterwards — and for several days made soft but audible eeeck-eeecking sounds by drawing breath back down his throat with his mouth closed, usually with a look of dismay on his face. His mother has tried to talk to him about this, has re-consulted the shrink (who’s advised many more sessions), and has even gotten Charley to “step in.” Paul at first claimed he couldn’t imagine what anybody was talking about, that all seemed normal to him, then later he said that making noises satisfied a legitimate inner urge and didn’t bother others, and that they should get over their problems with it, and him.
In these charged months I have tried, in essence, to increase my own ombudsman’s involvement, conducting early-morning phone conversations with him (one of which I’m awaiting hopefully this morning) and taking him and now and then his sister, Clarissa, on fishing trips to the Red Man Club, an exclusive anglers’ hideaway I joined for this very purpose. I have also taken him once to Atlantic City on a boys-only junket to see Mel Tormé at TropWorld, and twice to Sally’s seashore house, there to be idle-hours bums, swimming in the ocean when syringes and solid human waste weren’t competing for room, walking the beach and talking over affairs of the world and himself in a nondirected way until way after dark.
In these talks, Paul has revealed much: most notably, that he’s waging a complex but losing struggle to forget certain things. He remembers, for instance, a dog we had years ago when we were all a nuclear family together in Haddam, a sweet, wiggly, old basset hound named Mr. Toby, who none of us could love enough and all doted on like candy, but who got flattened late one summer afternoon right in front of our house during a family cookout. Poor Mr. Toby actually clambered up off the Hoving Road pavement and in a dying dash galumphed straight to Paul and leaped into his arms before shuddering, wailing once and croaking. Paul has told me in these last weeks that even then (at only age six) he was afraid the incident would stay in his mind, possibly even for the rest of his life, and ruin it. For weeks and weeks, he said, he lay awake in his room thinking about Mr. Toby and worrying about the fact that he was thinking about it. Though eventually the memory had gone away, until just after the Finast rubber incident, when it came back, and now he thinks about Mr. Toby “a lot” (possibly constantly), thinks that Mr. Toby should be alive still and we should have him — and by extension, of course, that his poor brother, Ralph, who died of Reye’s, should also be alive (as he surely should) and we should all still be we. There are even ways, he’s said, in which all this is not that unpleasant to think about, since he remembers much of that early time, before bad things happened, as having been “fun.” And in that sense, his is a rare species of nostalgia.
He has also told me that as of recently he has begun to picture the thinking process, and that his seems to be made of “concentric rings,” bright like hula hoops, one of which is memory, and that he tries but can’t make them all “fit down flush on top of each other” in the congruent way he thinks they should — except sometimes just before the precise moment of sleep, when he can briefly forget about everything and feel happy. He has likewise told me about what he refers to as “thinking he’s thinking,” by which he tries to maintain continuous monitorship of all his thoughts as a way of “understanding” himself and being under control and therefore making life better (though by doing so, of course, he threatens to drive himself nuts). In a way his “problem” is simple: he has become compelled to figure out life and how to live it far too early, long before he’s seen a sufficient number of unfixable crises cruise past him like damaged boats and realized that fixing one in six is a damn good average and the rest you have to let go — a useful coping skill of the Existence Period.
All this is not a good recipe, I know. In fact, it’s a bad recipe: a formula for a life stifled by ironies and disappointments, as one little outer character tries to make friends with or exert control over another, submerged, one, but can’t. (He could end up as an academic, or a U.N. translator.) Plus, he’s left-handed and so is already threatened by earlier-than-usual loss of life, by greater chances of being blinded by flying objects, scalded by pans of hot grease, bitten by rabid dogs, hit by cars piloted by other lefthanders, of deciding to live in the Third World, of not getting the ball over the plate consistently and of being divorced like his Dad and Mom.
My fatherly job, needless to say, is not at all easy at this enforced distance of miles: to coax by some middleman’s charm his two foreign selves, his present and his childish past, into a better, more robust and outward-tending relationship — like separate, angry nations seeking one government — and to sponsor self-tolerance as a theme for the future. This, of course, is what any father should do in any life, and I have tried, despite the impediments of divorce and time and not always knowing my adversary. Only it seems plain to me now, and as Ann believes, I have not been completely successful.
But bright and early tomorrow I am picking him up all the way in Connecticut and staging for both our benefits a split-the-breeze father-and-son driving campaign in which we will visit as many sports halls of fame as humanly possible in one forty-eight-hour period (this being only two), winding up in storied Cooperstown, where we’ll stay in the venerable Deerslayer Inn, fish on scenic Lake Otsego, shoot off safe and ethical fireworks, eat like castaways, and somehow along the way I’ll work (I hope) the miracle only a father can work. Which is to say: if your son begins suddenly to fall at a headlong rate, you must through the agency of love and greater age throw him a line and haul him back. (All this somehow before delivering him to his mother in NYC and getting myself back here to Haddam, where I myself, for reasons of familiarity, am best off on the 4th of July.)
And yet, and yet. Even a good idea can be misguided if embarked on in ignorance. And who could help wondering: is my surviving son already out of reach and crazy as a betsy bug, or headed fast in that dire direction? Are his problems the product of haywire neurotransmitters, only solvable by preemptive chemicals? (This was the New Haven guy’s, Dr. Stopler’s, initial view.) Will he turn gradually into a sly recluse with a bad complexion, rotten teeth, bitten nails, yellow eyes, who abandons school early, hits the road, falls in with the wrong bunch, tries drugs, and finally becomes convinced trouble is his only dependable friend, until one sunny Saturday it, too, betrays him in some unthought-of and unbearable way, after which he stops off at a suburban gun store, then spirits on to some quilty mayhem in a public place? (This I frankly don’t expect, since he has yet to exhibit any of the “big three” of childhood homicidal dementia: attraction to fire, the need to torture helpless animals, or bed-wetting; and because he is in fact quite softhearted and mirthful, and always has been.) Or, and in the best-case scenario, is he — as happens to us all and as his mother hopes — merely going through a phase, so that in eight weeks he’ll be trying out for lonely end on the Deep River JV?