I stared down at Matthew. "Well, you're right, Matt," I said. "He is pretending."
"But who is he pretending to be?" Matt asked.
"Himself," I said.
Matt laughed at this and said, "That's silly," and then he burst into song. "Ha, Ha," he sang, "Rumpelstiltskin is my name! Rumpel, Rumpel, Rumpel, Rumpel, Rumpelstiltskin is my name!"
From the time he turned three, Matt had been drawing every day. His egglike people with arms that sprouted from giant heads soon gained bodies and then backgrounds. At five, he was sketching people in profile walking down the street. Although Matt's pedestrians had oversized noses and appeared to be moving stiffly, they came in all sizes and shapes. They were fat and thin and black and tan and brown and pink, and he dressed them up in suits and dresses and the motorcycle garb he must have noticed on Christopher Street. Bins overflowed with litter and soda cans on his street corners. Flies hovered over the debris, and he etched cracks into the sidewalks. His bulbous dogs peed and shat as their owners stood ready with sheets of newspaper. Miss Langenweiler, Matt's kindergarten teacher, reported that she had never seen such detail in a child's drawings in all her years of teaching. Matthew balked at letters and numbers, however. When I showed him a b or a t in the newspaper, he ran away from me. Erica bought elaborately illustrated ABC books with large colored letters. "Ball," she would say and point to the picture of a beach ball. "B-A-L-L." But Matthew wanted nothing of balls and B's. "Read the Seven Ravens, Mommy," he would say, and Erica would put down the tedious new alphabet book and pick up our tattered copy of Grimm's Fairy Tales.
I sometimes thought that Matt saw too much, that his eyes and brain were so flooded with the world's astounding particularity that the same gift that had made him sensitive to the habits of flies, to cracks in cement, and the way belts buckled made it difficult for him to learn to read. It took my son a long time to understand that in English words moved from left to right on a page and that the gaps between the clusters of letters signified a break between words.
Mark and Matthew played together every afternoon after school while Grace handed out carrot sticks and bits of apple, read them stories, and negotiated the occasional dispute. That daily routine was broken in February. Bill explained to me that Mark had been "very upset" after his mother's Christmas visit and that he and Lucille had decided together that Mark would be better off with her in Texas. I didn't press Bill for details. The few times he spoke to me about his son, his soft voice would tighten and his eyes would settle somewhere beyond me—on a wall or a book or a window. Bill made three visits to Houston that spring. During those long weekends, he and Mark holed up in a motel, watched cartoons, took walks, played with Star Wars men, and read "Hansel and Gretel." "That's all he wants to hear—over and over and over again," Bill said. "I know it by heart." Bill had to leave Mark with his mother, but he took the story with him and began to work on a series of constructions that would become his own version of the tale. By the time Hansel and Gretel was finished, Lucille and Mark were living in New York again. She had been offered another year of teaching at Rice but had turned it down.
Not long after Mark left for Texas, Gunna died. The death of this imaginary boy, who had been around for two years, was followed by the arrival of a new person Matt called "the Ghosty Boy." When Erica asked Matt how Gunna died, he told her, "He got too old and couldn't live anymore."
One evening after his story, Erica and I were sitting on the end of Matt's bed. "I have the Ghosty Boy feeling," he said.
"Who's the Ghosty Boy?" Erica asked, leaning over him. She put her lips to his forehead.
"He's a boy in my dreams."
"Do you dream about him a lot?" I asked.
Matt nodded. "He doesn't have a face and he can't talk, but he can fly. Not like Peter Pan, just a little bit off the ground and then he sinks down. Sometimes he's here, but other times he's away."
"Where does he go?" Erica asked.
"I don't know. I've never been there."
"Does he have a name," I said, "other than Ghosty Boy?"
"Yes, but he can't talk, Dad, so he can't say!"
"Oh yes, I forgot."
"He doesn't frighten you, does he, Matt?" Erica said. "No, Mom," he said. "He's kind of in me, you see. Half in me, and half out of me, and I know he's not really real."
We accepted this cryptic explanation and kissed Matt good night. The Ghosty Boy came and went for years. After a while he became a memory for Matt, a personage he would refer to in the past tense. Erica and I came to understand that the boy was a damaged creature, someone to be pitied. Matthew would shake his head when he talked about the boy's feeble attempts at flight, which lifted him only inches off the ground. His tone was oddly superior. He talked as if he, Matthew Hertzberg, unlike his figment, were soaring regularly over New York City with a large and highly efficient pair of wings.
The Ghosty Boy was still active when Violet defended her dissertation in May. She and Erica spent hours discussing what Violet should wear for the event. When I interrupted them to say that defense committees never look at a doctoral candidate's clothes, Erica cut me off. "You're not a woman. What do you know?" Violet decided on a conservative skirt, a blouse, and low heels, but underneath she wore a whalebone corset that she had rented from a costume company in the Village. Before she left for her defense, she appeared in our doorway to model herself. "The corset's for good luck," Violet said as she spun around for me and Erica. "It makes me feel closer to my hysterics, but it also squishes me in the right places." She looked down at her belly. "I've gotten kind of fat from sitting on my butt all these months."
"You're not fat, Violet," Erica said. "You're voluptuous."
"I'm pudgy and you know it." Violet kissed Erica and then she kissed me. Five hours later, she returned in triumph. "It must be good for something," she said about the Ph.D. "I know there aren't any jobs around here. Last week a friend told me there were only three positions in French history in the entire country. I'm destined for unemployment. Maybe I'll turn into one of those overeducated, hyperarticulate cab-drivers who whiz around the boroughs singing Puccini arias or quoting Voltaire to their passengers in the backseat, who keep praying they'll just shut up and drive."
Violet didn't become a cabdriver, and she didn't become a professor. A year later, the University of Minnesota Press published Hysteria and Suggestion: Compliance, Rebellion, and Illness at the Salpêtrière. The teaching jobs Violet might have secured were in far-flung places like Nebraska or Georgia, and she didn't want to leave New York. A contemporary art museum in Spain had bought Bill's three large hysteria works, and many of the smaller pieces had sold to collectors. His money worries had lifted, at least for a while. But well before her first book was published, Violet had begun research for a second book about another cultural epidemic.
She had decided to write about eating disorders. Although Violet exaggerated her plumpness, it was true that her full curves had come to resemble the rounder movie queens of my youth. She knew her body was unfashionable, particularly in Manhattan, where thinness was a requirement for the truly chic. Violet's work inevitably turned on her private passions, and food was one of them. She cooked well and she ate with gusto—often dribbling in the process. Nearly every time Erica and I shared a meal with Bill and Violet, it ended with Bill, napkin in hand, delicately wiping Violet's face to clean up errant bits of food or spots of juice.