Chapter One
Sunday dawned blazing hot. Matt and the kid on the streetcar had faded as tricks and dreams do by light of day. Still, they left me aware of my Shadow. I hadn't slept well. The same wise man who compared my double to a Silent Partner had told me he was like an embezzler stealing my soul bit by bit.
That Sunday morning, I went by George Halle's apartment to take care of his mail and make sure the place was still intact. A quick look around was all that I could stand. Wooden louvers shaded the windows, cut the sound of the far West Village to nothing.
My memories of the place were wondrous. Over the past couple of decades, George and I had been lovers, business partners, friends, and, finally, patient and caregiver. The furniture is old, modern stuff from the forties. The art is American illustration and cartoons. Polished and mellow, the rooms awaited the return of George, who had now been taken off life support.
Ducking out of the place, I locked the door, walked down to the street, and stopped. George's block stood empty except for a scavenger. His garbage bags half full of bottles and cans, he rummaged in the trash with his back to me. He was gray haired and about my build. But his face, when he turned, was not mine.
The incident made me decide to stick to public places. Over on Hudson Street with a whole afternoon to kill, I idly cruised amid clusters of guys and women sauntering back from brunch, the gay Sunday service.
For the first time in years I seriously considered my early past. Ironic that it took Ozzie Klackman and my Shadow to do it, since antique toys and books, the compost heap of childhood, are my business. Those things, however, are nostalgia, memory in costume and party hat. Real recollection, as I was about to find out, is something else.
Memory, the word itself, evokes for me an image of bright lights and green grass, a night game at Fenway Park in, maybe, '48 or '49. If so, I am four or five, up way past bedtime, dozing against my uncle Mike, the cop. Suddenly everyone stands up and he lifts me onto his shoulder.
I see figures in gray, running. Then out of the left-field darkness sails a white ball. At third base, a man in white, his back to me, takes two steps to his left, nabs it, pivots, and fires. The catcher, his scary mask abandoned, comes up the line toward third, catches the ball, crouches, braces, tags the sliding runner. The game ends. The crowd roars in triumph, able for a moment to forget that they are Red Sox fans and thus doomed.
For the rest of the afternoon, as fragments, disjointed, incomplete, drifted from my subconscious into my awareness, I thought of the ball flying out of the darkness into the light. As I walked away from George's I recalled this line of a poem:
FOUNTAINS IN SUMMER
It evoked images of sunlight on green leaves and my mother leading me by the hand in the Boston Public Garden. My guess is that I was about three.
No trip downtown at that time was complete without a visit to the Swan Boats. So, at some point we must have floated on the shallow pond under low bridges with a Boston University undergraduate pedaling away in the great white bird at the back. But for the moment I couldn't say for sure. Nor could I remember more of the poem or where I had heard it.
On that summer day fifty years later, I walked north and east, unaware of my destination until I arrived at the Sixth Avenue Flea Market. In those aisles of jumbled tchotchke and kitsch, sprawling through empty parking lots and garages, trawled by every boomer who somehow forgot to get invited to the Hamptons for the weekend, Warhol once assembled his million-dollar cookie jar collection.
My eyes refused to focus on tarnished brass door knockers and plastic place mats with pictures of Italy. Then a couple turned and smiled and seemed to share their smile with me.
She, it appeared, was a young part-Asian woman, blue eyed and black haired, slim in a green silk blouse. He, I realized, was misshapen. But his face was delicate, his smile beautiful. Turning, he replaced something on a table.
A damsel and a dwarf, I thought as they moved away. I should have been able to spot my Shadow's hand. But right then, all I was aware of was what he had put back on the table. Amid a collection of distressed Humpty Dumpty magazines, coverless copies of The Pokey Little Puppy, was my face on a decaying dust jacket.
Actually, it was just a drawing of a little boy in a striped jersey and shorts. An Eton cap perched on a blond head almost as big as his trunk. Eyes wide with wonder, he stared at an Indian chief in full regalia. The title was Go West, Jelly Bean!
Others modeled before and after. But for several books, I was Jelly Bean. In truth, JB was sort of featureless. He was Everykid back in 1950 when they thought that meant a white boy.
The books weren't quite up there with Dr. Seuss or Curious George. But more than a dozen titles got produced between the late forties and late fifties. If you were a child then and read, you probably had a Jelly Bean or two and may remember the gimmick, the running gag.
Jelly Bean never spoke. But this silent kid had so vivid an imagination that he turned into whatever attracted his attention. You knew just by looking at the cover, for instance, that he would end up as an Indian chief. He could only be brought back to himself by his parents' call of "Jelly Bean, where are you?"
Always there remained some evidence of his shape shifting, like the streak of war paint left on his face at the end of Go West. His parents, however, never caught on.
Dealing in antiques, I had encountered better copies of Go West, had bought them, sold them, even mentioned my connection with them to friends and customers. But that afternoon, almost like Jelly Bean, I found myself trapped in the thing that had hooked my attention. I became my own six-year-old self on a glorious spring weekend I spent dressed as an Indian chief.
"You buying or dreaming?" the dealer asked. "Ten dollars."
Being treated like a civilian aroused my professional pride. "For this beat-up copy? A first edition, preserved by some lonely maniac for forty-eight years in a state of mint purity, will fetch ten. Maybe."
So he backed down. But not all the way. Because he had spotted my weakness, I paid four dollars for something I would have said was only worth a buck. "I can get you all of that series," he called, going for the kill as I escaped.
A block east of the market is Madison Square Park. On a reasonably sound and isolated bench, I examined my find. The cover had two names, Helena Godspeed Hewett and Max Walter. Mrs. Hewett created and wrote the Jelly Bean books. I had a single memory of a big woman in a huge hat who pretended to adore kids, but was obviously annoyed when I asked if the foxes on her stole were kittens.
Max Walter's name evoked a lot more. I remembered him sitting at his easel, pencils in hand, sketching me, saying again and again, "It's perfect. Just one more minute, Kevin." He was catching Jelly Bean's look of goggle-eyed wonder Max's goatee was what held me. He was the only person I'd ever met with a beard. It fascinated me that it moved right along with his mouth when he spoke.
Max's wife, Frieda, and my mother were friends. The two of them sat in the studio drinking wine, talking. "What's great about Sandra," my mother said, "is that with her you don't need a second opinion. She's so two-faced. I'm surprised she's never run into herself."
Max and Frieda laughed. Uneasily, I wondered if people often met themselves. "Okay!" Max told me, chin and beard wagging. "Take a break, Kevin." I walked over to the window. Max's studio was on the top floor of a house in Jamaica Plain. In the distance were the Arnold Arboretum's acres of trees, hills, and ponds.
But I stared at a weed-filled lot right across the street. There, two chains of boys and girls, aged five to ten, faced each other with hands linked, playing red rover. I watched as one small boy ran at the opposite line, threw himself on a pair of joined hands, and bore two kids almost to the ground. But he couldn't break their grip and he had to be on their side. I wanted so much to be down there.
With her uncanny timing, my mother brought over a glass of ginger ale and distracted me. "See what we have now," she said. I turned back toward the room and there was a feathered headdress, moccasins, a fringed vest and pants, a tomahawk, a bow and quiver of arrows. She pointed to an array of bright tubes. "War paint!"
The headdress went on even before I shed Jelly Bean's stupid clothes. On that glorious day, they let me go outside in my regalia. Down I went, two flights to the street. And there I stood on the porch with my arms folded in front of me. The game across the way came to a halt. The kids approached slowly. Before they reached me, I turned silently and marched back into the house.
All that day and the next, they called outside for the real Indian to come out and play. I would show myself at the window. On my breaks I'd go downstairs and walk among them. I said nothing. I thought that if they knew I was just an ordinary kid, they would ignore me. I wanted to play, but I didn't know how.
The next time I remember modeling for Max, it was cold out, the trees were bare. But I wore a bathing suit and stood under a bright light. The book must have been By the Sea, Jelly Bean! which came just after Go West! It's the one where Jelly Bean gets taken to the beach. By then, Helena Godspeed Hewett had gotten the series down to a dull routine.
At the sitting, the costumes, even the uniforms, were a pain. It was raining. No kids waited to ask for the real marine. My mother sat without talking much. Things had begun to change for her and me. For Frieda too. She had just had a baby. I was fascinated.
Then Max said, "Okay Kev, take a break. Let's get into the sailor suit next." Bored and tired of this game, I began to whine. I guess my mother was bored too. Sighing, she put down her glass and started getting me changed.
Turning to protest, I saw Frieda and her child and was oblivious to anything else. Frieda and Max were bohemians. She nursed in the studio. The baby, her eyes wide and unblinking, was attached to her mother's breast. In perfect harmony, the breast bobbed gently to the rhythm of the baby's mouth. An instant later, the tiny throat would swallow. The baby kept one hand curved in the air, fingers splayed as if she were maintaining her balance on an invisible high wire.
I don't know how long I stood. But at the same moment I realized two things. Max was sketching intensely and I was naked. Betrayed, I tried to hide myself. Max said, "The end of innocence."
That was the last time I had to model for Jelly Bean. It was also around then that my mother got married again. My father had died in the war and I never saw him. My childhood playmates were my mother's friends, actors and artists, poseurs and lallygaggers. As time went on they drifted away. My mother's smile would disappear if I asked about them. Above all else, I wanted that smile.
One last memory of my mother and Frieda remains. It happened at the very end of their friendship, in high autumn, in the Arboretum beside a pond just off the road.
I believe my mother and Frank had just gotten married. That means we had moved to a house in Dorchester near my grandmother's and I was the new kid in Sister Gertrude Julia's third grade at Mary, Queen of Heaven School.
Frieda and my mother talked behind me as I fed a flock of mallards that had paused on their way south. With the accuracy and blindness of childhood, I knew that my mother was angry, but did not yet connect this with her drinking. She said in too loud a voice, "I thought with my father gone it would be different. But nobody wants me to be happy. They don't want me to live like everyone else."
"Of course they do, Ellen," said Frieda, and I knew that my mother was arguing without anyone arguing back. I wished as hard as I could that I would turn and find my mother smiling.
"People are jealous about Frank and me."
"Not at all." By their voices, I could tell that my mother and Frieda were walking slowly up to the benches by the road. "Just rest for a minute, El."
That's when a hand lightly touched my neck and I turned. Two figures sat about thirty yards away with their backs to me. My mother's querulous voice was indistinct. But that mother was just a Shadow.
Right beside me was my real mother. Instead of showing anger, she had a wonderful conspiratorial smile at the joke we were playing. Off we went, the two of us, on a walk around the pond, both watching our feet churn the leaves, turning suddenly each to catch the other's eyes and laugh.
When we had circled the pond completely, my mother led me to the bench. She and her Shadow merged. Frieda seemed tired, concerned. But my mother winked at me, reached out her hand for mine. If it was a dream, I must then have awakened.