Is it the future pouring into the present that shatters yesterday and makes of it such a jumble?
6
6. In June 1956,1 left Dalton and got ready to go on to the Bronx High School of Science, a city public school (yes, in the Bronx) of megacephalic reputation, where, already, some of my older cousins went. One, Nanny, a year before, had written a couple of brief, reflective essays, one of which dealt with the time years before that, when she, her younger brothers, and my aunt (my father’s older sister) and uncle had lived upstairs from us in the building on Seventh Avenue. The essay had been published in the school’s literary magazine, Dynamo, for January 1955. My family made much of it, and I sat in my cousins’ dark living room, on Fish Avenue in the Bronx, reading it again and again, now looking at other pieces in the magazine, even memorizing some of the other poems in the issue by students I’d never heard of.
Nanny had written:
LEVY AND DELANY FUNERAL HOME was the sign that always greeted me when I came home from school. My uncle was Delany. Levy was dead and had been even before I was born. This always used to remind me of “Scrooge and Marley,” except that my uncle was no Scrooge. He was tall, mild-mannered, and quite the opposite of Scrooge or any stereotyped mortician. He and his family lived on the second floor, while we lived on the third floor of the small brick house that seemed out of place between the towering Harlem apartments. At times I wished I didn’t live over a funeral home, especially when my friends teased me about ghosts and other horrible apparitions of the dead. Although I laughed with them to hide my self-consciousness, I never could see how a corpse could harm anyone. … My young brother, my cousin [that was me, I knew], and I thought nothing of playing hide-and-seek in the basement among the new coffins on display. … There were two entrances to the building. The door to the left led directly upstairs and the door on the right to the funeral parlor. Sometimes I used the right-hand door. Once inside the funeral parlor, members of the family could use another door which opened into the hallway leading to the stairs. One day, when I came home from school, I walked through the funeral parlor toward the door to the hallway and saw two large screens near this door.
My curiosity was aroused, and by climbing up the stairs and holding on to the banister, I was able to peer around the doorway and over the screen. I caught my breath, for lying amid white satin was a most beautiful woman. She wore a long blue gown: a red rose was fastened in her dark hair. …[3]
As I read and reread my cousin’s account of a memory of ten or more years before, while I recognized the tone and the timbre of her description of “the small brick building” where I now lived (my family — now — had both the second and third floors), I found myself curious over two things. First, how could she have described my father as “mild-mannered?” To me he was always an angry, anxious man. Perhaps, I thought, because he might read it, she’d had to say something nice. (Her own father, my Uncle Ed, had been, in my own memories of that earlier time, the mild and gentle man in the house.) Also (and oddly this bothered me even more), though the two doors into the building she’d mentioned in her essay were just as she’d described, she’d committed a fundamental distortion of the architecture.
Opening from one of the offices into the stairway up to the second floor (yes, that office had once been a viewing room: I could remember the screens with their maroon crushed velvet in their wooden frames standing beside the caskets), that door was much too far from the foot of the stairs, by three or four feet, to allow you, in the hall stair, to look through it while standing on the steps themselves.
Nanny was tall, almost six feet. But — and, back at home, I tried it again and again — you would have to have been at least nine or even ten feet tall to stand on the bottom step and lean forward far enough to see around the jamb and through the door into the other room. And of course with each step you went up, you’d have to be even taller. As I stood on the bottom step, holding the end of the banister and leaning out to test it, I found myself reflecting: Nanny’s clear and lucid memory was of a beautiful brown-skinned young woman with a rose in her hair, lying in one of the satin-lined caskets. Mine, from no more than a year back, was of walking, by myself, into the little morgue behind the chapel, where a dark, ordinary-looking black man, in his late twenties or thirties, lay, naked, on the white-enamel embalming table with its drain grooves leading to the trough around it. I walked around him a bit, looking at his genitals, his slightly turned-out feet, his lightly closed eyes, watching him under the fluorescent lights for a minute. Fascinated by what, I wasn’t sure, I reached over and took the cool and wholly limp hand in mine — and found myself getting an erection. …
Surely somewhere a reality lay behind Nanny’s account — an account that, indeed, presented itself as real. The family was terribly proud of her piece, passing it around from one to the other; and my father said, again and again, how touched he was by her memory. (Would I, I wondered — a full year before I entered the school — ever have anything published in Dynamo?) But whatever that reality was, it had been sealed outside of, and by, the text. I would never have dared question it, to Nanny or anyone else — because I did not want anyone to question mine. Whatever had actually happened was held, in some other time and place, safely outside any language that I could bring myself to initiate, or that anyone else even thought to.
That seemed to be, if anything, the power of writing — to hold sway over memory, making it public, keeping it private, possibly, even, keeping it secret from oneself — for I was sure Nanny felt (ten years after the fact) that the impossible feat of elongation she’d described at the foot of the stairs was as true as — many years on — I would come to feel my sentence was about my age at Dad’s death.
6.01. Secretly in those years, I would write down my masturbation fantasies in a black loose-leaf binder I kept beneath my underwear in the tall, stained-oak bureau against the wall in my third-floor room. They had nothing to do with corpses in the downstairs morgue, nor, really, with any of my childhood experiences and experiments with sex. They were, rather, grandiose, homoerotic, full of kings and warriors, leather armor, slaves, swords, and brocade, mixing the inflated language and the power fantasies of Robert E. Howard (Conan the Conqueror) and Frank Yerby (The Saracen Blade), whose books I hunted out in the local library or from the third-floor bookshelves of my Aunt Virginia’s Montclair home, with the street language of Seventh Avenue and the off-color anecdotes collected by the brothers John and Allen Lomax in their five-and six-hundred-page scholarly tomes that I found at the home of my Aunt Dorothy and my Uncle Myles — language whose erotics, in both cases, came not from any constellation of specific sexual associations but almost wholly because its “god-damn,” its “nigger,” its “shit,” its “kike,” its “piss,” its “wop,” its “prick,” its “fuck,” its “pussy” was — in our house — wholly forbidden; and the specifically sexual words were, I knew, by law, forbidden to ordinary writing.
Yet I had already discovered a trade-off between writing and desire, at ten, eleven, twelve. …
A fantasy I had not written out yet, or had only begun to write, would last me a long time, over several days — even a week or more. If, however, I wrote it down, filling in descriptions of place, atmosphere, thoughts, speech, clothing, accidental gestures, the whole narrative excess we think of as “realism” making my written account as complete and as narrationally rich as I could, my own erotic response was much greater; the orgasm it produced was stronger, more satisfying, hugely pleasurable. But, once this had occurred, the fantasy was used up. It became just words on paper, at one with its own descriptive or aesthetic residue, but with little or no lingering erotic charge.
3
Nanny Murrell, “Sleeping Beauty,” in