Lying with the Dead Page 5

  Mom had warned me about strange men—never talk to them, never accept a car ride or candy. If a man touched me, I was supposed to scream bloody murder. Her cautions didn’t extend to what I should do in the case of strange women.

  What kept me rooted to the spot was what should have raised the shrillest alarm. The guy had a gun—a .22 rifle—and cartridges slung bandolier-style across his chest. From the webbed belt around his waist dangled a Bowie knife and a pair of handcuffs.

  “How about a hotdog and a beer?” he asked me.

  “I’m only eleven.”

  He laughed. “That’s old enough.”

  “Not to drink.”

  “Good. That means more for me.” He popped a can of Gunther with a church key from his knapsack.

  Every bit of his equipment excited and unsettled me in equal measure. I longed to handle the weapons. The man had to have sensed that. “Like to see my rifle?” he asked. “Don’t be afraid. It’s not loaded.”

  He handed over the .22 and sidled around behind me. “Press it against your shoulder and pull the trigger.” Encircling me in a loose embrace, he inserted my finger into the trigger housing. The click of the firing pin was no louder than a snapped twig. Although discomfited by his closeness, his laying on of hands, his breath on my neck, I still didn’t run.

  “Wanna see my knife?” He yanked it from the scabbard and flipped it at my feet. The blade sank in soft leaf mulch between my tennis shoes. “Go ahead. Pick it up.”

  I hefted the knife by its carved bone handle. Nothing had ever seemed more seductive and beautiful to me.

  “Do me a favor and you’re free to keep it,” he said.

  “My mother won’t let me.”

  “Let you what?”

  “Have a knife.”

  “Hide it from her. Don’t you have secrets?”

  I told him that I didn’t.

  “I don’t believe that,” he said. “Me, I got plenty. Even where I am and where I go’s a secret. I’m traveling around the country meeting young fellas like you and looking to get laid. Can you help me?”

  “I’m only eleven,” I said again. “I don’t know any girls your age.”

  He laughed soundlessly. “Me neither. But we have each other. If you wanna be friends and have some fun, you’re welcome to the knife.”

  “I gotta go home. My mother’s waiting dinner for me.”

  “Hold on a sec.” He grabbed the waistband of my blue jeans and shoved a hand down into my underpants, all the way to the sack of my balls. “I won’t hurt you.”

  I thrashed to get away, but he tightened his grip. His whiskery chin scraped my face. I screamed, and while it wasn’t the kind of bloodcurdler Mom recommended, he let go.

  “Hey, I didn’t do anything wrong,” he said. “Go ahead and keep the knife. And keep your trap shut. Nothing happened.”

  I told Dr. Rokoko that I grabbed the knife and raced home. I didn’t mention that Mom wasn’t there yet, allowing me time to think things through. I went up to my room and lay in bed with the knife on the covers beside me. The blade had a dull sheen and was cold to the touch. The bone handle was smooth and warm.

  The man, I decided, had been right about one thing. Nothing had happened. Or not much. But if I confessed to Mom that I stayed in the woods with a stranger when I should have run, she’d beat me black and blue. Then she’d call the cops and I’d have to own up to them that the guy stuck his hand down my pants. They’d ask where he touched me and why didn’t I fight back? Why didn’t I use the knife? Did I want to do what he said? And what exactly was that? I had a hard time imagining sex with a girl. I couldn’t picture what the man was suggesting.

  After the cops caught him, there’d be a trial and I’d have to repeat the story in front of a flock of people. Then the guy would go to prison. All because I didn’t do what Mom told me to. All because, as she frequently complained, “You’re never happy unless you’re making other people miserable.” All because I had been spellbound by the knife, and because the man had sex on his brain, something I had more and more on mine. He wasn’t to blame. I was.

  So I never told her about him, just as I didn’t admit to Dr. Rokoko that I hadn’t emerged from the incident unscathed. But the scar wasn’t emotional. When Mom found the knife hidden in my closet, and I refused to say where I got it, she whipped my bare ass with a wire coat hanger. She whipped me so hard I bled. “Don’t you understand what knives have done to this family?” she screamed. “Don’t you understand?”

  In the face of my silence, Dr. Rokoko draws ruminatively on the tobacco-filled pipe that he hasn’t lit. He puffs and appears to be mulling over the story, evaluating it and me. “What am I supposed to do now?” he finally asks. “Applaud? Offer you a curtain call and a standing ovation?”

  “What am I supposed to do?” I shoot back. “Go ballistic so you’ll know what I’m like when I lose my temper?”

  “I’d rather that than listen to more glib BS. Save your anecdotes for talk shows. Were you breast-fed?”

  “Oh Jesus, spare me the psychobabble.”

  “I bet your mother’s milk dried up. You’re a very hungry man. That’s why you talk so much crap. You have a mania for force-feeding people because you weren’t fed.”

  I sigh and say nothing. I don’t care to add credence to his diagnosis by talking more. Still, I realize I can’t stay silent forever if I hope to avoid being hauled back into court. So in subsequent sessions, I narrate a highly selective account of my childhood. I concede that Dad’s dead, but don’t add that he was murdered by my brother. I describe Mom as a Penelope-like figure, struggling with three kids instead of a houseful of suitors, but I don’t acknowledge her seismic temper. I speak of Candy’s polio, and in a politically correct manner, I admit that Maury’s “an Aspie,” an example of neuro-diversity. But I don’t tell him how deeply this distressed me. I refer to our family as dysfunctional, but don’t reveal just how truly fucked up we were.

  Not long after I start in with Dr. Rokoko, I sign a contract to write my memoirs. Of course, this sounds very grand, the sort of preening star turn, the capstone for an actor that might come much later in his career. But the publisher has in mind a manuscript that’s less about me and more about my famous enemies and friends. The escapades of Lord this and Dame that, greenroom spats, sexual peccadilloes, a peek behind the arias.

  With the BBC negotiations still stalled, money is a major incentive for me. Still, my ambition is to produce an unimpeachably literary book, not a celebrity trash wallow. In the area of writing, I’m not an utter novice. I have the reputation of being a thoughtful actor, a serious interpreter of texts, and I’m often invited to judge publishing awards, appear on panels at the Edinburgh Festival and supply voice-overs for high-minded documentaries. BBC has presented several of my radio plays, and I have a file cabinet of scribblings for prospective film scripts.

  As I do with Dr. Rokoko, I start off going easy on family revelations and discussions of my low-rent upbringing. I leave it that I grew from nontheatrical roots. With a quote cadged from Cary Grant (né Archie Leach), I write, “I pretended to be somebody I wanted to be until finally I became that person. Or he became me.” Then I cite Marlon Brando, who said, “When you are a child who is unwanted or unwelcome, and the essence of who you are seems to be unacceptable, you look for an identity that will be acceptable.” And what better identity to assume, I ask, than one created by Shakespeare, Shaw, or Strindberg?

  Aeschylus, whom I toil over every day, doesn’t come in for a mention. And at first Mom doesn’t come in for more than a cameo appearance. But gradually it feels like matricide to eliminate her from the memoir and she moves to center stage. After all, she was my original producer, my earliest director, and sternest ongoing critic. She groomed me for stardom not like a typical doting stage-door mother, but like one of those merciless Indian matriarchs who cripple their children to improve their begging prospects. She pulled my hair to stand me up straight. She pinched my legs so I’d
stop fidgeting. She spit into a Kleenex and scrubbed my face clean. She smacked the crown of my head to smooth my cowlick. To hurry me up or slow me down, she cracked my arm like a whip.

  Paradoxically, as harsh as she could sometimes be, she was also smotheringly protective. She wouldn’t even allow me to join the altar boys—she was afraid to let me leave the house before daybreak to serve at six o’clock Mass—until Monsignor Dade declared that I might have “the call.” Ecstatic at the prospect of a priest in the family, she summarily shoved me out the door into the darkness.

  Little did she realize that her single loosening of the reins would free me for a different fate. Instead of sticking my neck into a clerical noose, I wriggled away from the future she and Monsignor Dade envisioned, and became the man I am. This narrow escape reminds me of the French playwright Jean Genet, who passed almost his entire childhood in prison. When later asked how juvenile detention might be improved, he replied that to the contrary it should be made crueler and universal. If everybody were savagely punished in youth, Genet said, there’d be far more beauty and poetry in the world.

  This theme of a beneficially stunted adolescence, set against the backstory of my stint with the altar boys, constitutes an early chapter in my memoir and is the first chunk that I feel comfortable sharing with the public. When invited to speak at the Burgh House about how I became an actor, I bring along a sheaf of typed pages. To prime the audience I joke that inside every Catholic boy there’s a spoiled priest and inside every Irishman a spoiled Proust. Then I don’t read my manuscript so much as perform it.

  Every summer, as a reward for our devotion, Monsignor Dade chartered a bus and drove a dozen altar boys to Glen Echo amusement park. The carnival rides didn’t start up until the afternoon, but the swimming pool opened early. While other kids spent the morning frisking in the cool water, I was stuck high and dry. Mom wouldn’t permit me to dip so much as a toe into what she called “that awful pee pod.” After polio had crippled Candy, she wasn’t about to lose another child to disease. I argued that no microbes could survive in Glen Echo’s astringently chlorinated pool. Still, Mom wouldn’t relent.

  So I clung to the fence, like those convicts I saw on Sunday at Maury’s slammer waiting in the yard at the hurricane wire, hoping for visitors. As if I didn’t feel excluded enough on my own, Monsignor Dade crowded in beside me in his black suit and starched collar.

  “Why aren’t you swimming?” he asked.

  “My mother won’t let me. She’s afraid I’ll catch something.”

  “And you obeyed her,” he marveled. “Even though you could have sneaked into the pool.”

  What was the point of explaining that I didn’t dare do anything behind her back? It was her punishment, not God’s, that I feared.

  “That’s wonderful, Quinn,” he said.

  Seeing nothing wonderful in my plight, I wandered off through the deserted park. Footsteps followed me. Monsignor Dade’s. Even after my run-in with the creep in the woods, I had no fear—the idea didn’t exist in those days—that a priest might groom a boy and crave his body. It was bad enough that he craved my soul. To me a religious vocation threatened to intensify the prison I was already trapped in. Holy orders, as I saw it, would sentence me to an eternity on the wrong side of the fence.

  As I ambled along, I heard workers tinkering on the innards of the Tunnel of Love, hosing down the Fun House and rattling utensils in closed food stalls. The smell of buttered popcorn made my stomach rumble. I debated whether to dig into the bag lunch Candy had packed for me. If I ate now, I’d starve later. But there was nothing else to do during this dead time.

  At a picnic table, I unwrapped a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and wolfed it down under strands of unlit bulbs that swayed overhead like a galaxy of spent stars. Everything at Glen Echo—the coiled snake of the roller coaster, the stopped clock of the Ferris wheel, the scorpion stingers of the Dodge’em Cars curled against the roof—everything appeared to be suspended in anticipation, waiting like me for my life to begin. Sparrows and pigeons provided scant back action, flitting above the rubbish bins. When I clapped my hands to scare them away, I noted that this glen had no echo.

  It dawned on me that this might be what Maury did every day in prison—kill time so that it wouldn’t kill him. Pay strict attention to the fleeting minutes so that he’d have power over them rather than let their randomness rule him.

  Then a shadow swept over me and Monsignor Dade lowered himself onto the bench. He tried to make small talk. That wasn’t easy with a kid who had had it dinned into him that he should never discuss family business with outsiders. Dad’s murder, Mom’s mood swings, Maury’s crime—there were so many things I was compelled to stay mum about.

  A pink-cheeked, talcum-scented man of late middle age, the monsignor soon zeroed in on the subject that obsessed him—my vocation. “To receive the call of God,” he said, “is the greatest honor that the Almighty God can bestow upon a man. No king or emperor on this earth has the power of the priest of God. No angel or archangel in heaven, no saint, not even the Blessed Virgin herself.”

  He concluded by promising to pay my tuition to Catholic high school and on through university if I’d give prayerful consideration to becoming a priest.

  Heightening the drama of the moment, the air at Glen Echo started to throb. Throughout the amusement park, engines coughed and the PA system shrieked. The metal facades at the ring toss and the shooting gallery thudded up, and the roller coaster took a thunderous trial run without riders. Rolling my lunch bag, I slammed it between my cupped hands with a loud pop. Monsignor Dade flinched, perhaps believing I had rejected the deal. But ruthless little schemer that I was, I recognized my ticket out, and in a masterful impersonation of earnestness I agreed to do what he asked of me. Son of a single impoverished mother, I agreed that in return for an education I could never have afforded, for an opportunity available to no one else in my family, I would pray over my vocation. And as good as his word, the monsignor continued to cover my college tuition even after it turned out that my vocation was to be an actor.

  My reading at Burgh House prompts a polite round of applause, loud and long enough to persuade me that I’ve done well by British standards. The inevitable few people linger to have a word. Only one person fully engages my attention, and as I speak to the others, I’m aware of playing to this ravishing brunette. Tall, lean, and as self-possessed as a fashion model, she’s dressed like an impecunious grad student in unbecoming corduroys and a loose-fitting sweater. A jumper, she’d call it. When it’s her turn to talk, I complacently expect compliments. Instead she says, “Don’t you think you should footnote the quote you stole from Joyce?”

  “Afraid I don’t remember Joyce. Are you a friend? Her sister?”

  “James Joyce. What the priest said is verbatim from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.”

  “You’re kidding. Are you accusing me of plagiarism?” I joke it off. “You need to speak to Monsignor Dade.”

  “Maybe I should,” she says with a taunting smile.

  “Afraid he died decades ago. Thank God I didn’t fall for a sales pitch he cribbed from a novel. He might have tricked me into taking vows of chastity and obedience.”

  “Like you tricked him into paying for your schooling.”

  “And thank God I have you to keep me honest.”

  Having met “cute,” as every romantic comedy demands, she and I go for a drink at Toast, a restaurant improbably located above the Hampstead tube station. Her name is Tamzin—“that’s with a zed,” she informs me. As I suspected, she’s a graduate student in literature at University College London and works part-time at the British Library. With no false modesty, she swears that she can track down any quote I’d care to use in my memoirs. I promise to keep her services in mind.

  “Non serviam. That’s from Joyce, too, and it’s what you should have told the priest. I will not serve,” she says. “But I’ll work for you if you need me.”

  “Oh, I
do.”

  Stepping out of Toast, we stumble into a rainstorm that slashes down like drill bits. What a shame, I say, that Tamzin has to catch a bus to her bedsit in Kentish Town when my house is close by. “Wouldn’t you like to spend the night?” I pose the question in a voice that hovers between that of a jolly uncle and a patently bogus gallant.

  Tamzin bats her lashes in theatrical bafflement. “Why would I do that?”

  Why, indeed? I might say, So that I can wake in the morning to worship your green eyes. But it’s tiresome to keep talking in italics. “Quite right. Let’s find you a cab.”

  In the following days, her question persists. Why would she do that? She’s at least fifteen years younger. Not an embarrassing age difference, but one that gives me pause when combined with her corduroys and schoolgirl jumper. Still, I arrange for us to have coffee. Then the next night we split a bottle of wine. Then we have dinner at a ghastly gastro-pub and go back to my place and end the evening with a kiss and a call for a taxi to take her home.

  I like her spirit, her sassiness, and while I assume she’s more attracted to my persona than to my corporal presence, she’s no pushover intellectually or in other respects. To impress her with my intellectual gravitas, I tell her about the Oresteia and BBC despite my superstition that it’s wrong to mention a deal before I have a contract and a cashable check. Then I invite her to fly to Venice for the weekend. Since it’s during the film festival, I camouflage the trip as business and urge her on by saying she can keep my quotes straight.

  What she infers from all this I have difficulty reading. The young are from a different country with their own dialect. That I’m American, rich, and in her eyes famous exaggerates the differences. Or so I suspect.

  Still, my hopes rise when she climbs into the taxi to the airport wearing a dress, a nice one that shows off her legs. On the aliscafo over to the Lido, Tamzin says she has a gift for me. Hair swirling in the wind, sturdy legs bracing her against the lagoon’s rough chop, she gropes in her shoulder bag and brings out a copy of Clifford Odets, American Playwright.