A slender, fair woman with a bump in her thin nose, my mother, whom I called Matka, was primarily occupied with caring for her only son, and secondarily occupied with spending money, albeit in an abstracted, halfhearted way. She brought me with her to estate sales in Blenheim, in Lysander, in Hastings, where we sifted through abandoned belongings and plundered what we wanted, returning to our brownstone with armfuls of yellowing Edwardian dresses and stuffed toys worn with love before being left behind like Moses in the reeds. As I headed up the stairs to my bedroom after such excursions, my arms laden with toys, my mother would put her cool hand on the back of my neck, lean down, and anoint the top of my head with a kiss. It wasn’t as though we were oblivious to what was happening overseas, although I see the oddity now of what Matka and I were doing: buying up the belongings of the dead while the dead piled up away from home. We did, financially and emotionally, feel the pinch of war less than most of Greenpoint. We were utterly grateful to Our Lord for this.
Very early on I realized that I was not like other boys I knew, or not as good at pretending to be anything other than what I was. What energies I had were sadly misdirected, scattershot, toward obscure targets. While I ran around with the other kids in McCarren Park, getting my shoes muddy and looking like any other golden-haired son of Polish America, I was also fretting about my bunny Flopsy’s left eye coming loose as his right one had, until I had to stop and catch my breath, a rising panic looming in my chest and forcing me home. While playing stickball I made myself ill, and even vomited in the grass, from dwelling on Leo the Lion’s head, which had fallen off its crumbling spring. I’d attributed to these dolls a kind of anima or animus. I wouldn’t say that I believed them to be truly living, but I did invest enough of my emotional attention into each one that they may as well have been alive. I kept them in the bottom dresser drawer, away from Ojciec’s disapproval, and dressed them fastidiously in the mornings and again at bedtime. Leaving these chores undone would undo me; it was the beginning of my so-called neuroses, though at the time I had no word for it.
Generally, I tried to mind my p’s and q’s when I was with my fellow children, putting up the best front I could. I threw rocks at Louise Bielecki, for example, and I called her snaggletoothed, the memories of which are enough to make me weep into my hands.
At the age of ten I borrowed a slender volume from the library, titled The Man Who Loved Wolves—a tell-all biography about William P. Harding, the infamous National Geographic writer and photographer who lived for years among wolves, and who was known best for being the first man to expose the phenomenon of wolf cannibalism. On the cover Harding posed in a runner’s crouch atop a cliff, with his hands on the backs of two large, sitting wolves. His facial expression suggested a deep-seated anguish extant since birth. What drew me to this book was not the cover, however, but Harding’s quote on the dust jacket: “Man and wolf are the same creature—brutal, beautiful, and not meant to be alone.” But while I sprawled out on my bed, slowly paging through the saga of Harding’s life, the scenes of wilderness and wolves gave way to a lurid depiction of his alcoholism and suicide, and this I could not comprehend. To be sure, my parents drank; but they had never fallen down a flight of stairs and broken four ribs and an arm, as Harding had, nor had they even considered (I was certain of this) leaping off a cliff to be picked at by vultures for days before their rotting corpses were discovered, again as Harding had.
Remembering it today, my bafflement is almost touching. That a man could purposefully end his own life, and in so doing give up his most beloved things, was truly beyond my understanding. Yet from my childish, perhaps preconscious aversion to the idea of Harding’s suicide, I can discern an attraction—an inability to let go of the horror, as I had failed to set aside my concerns for Flopsy and Leo.
I can safely say that William P. Harding was solely responsible for my becoming a preadolescent insomniac. My attempts at sleep tangled with images: Harding’s plummet; a pack of wolves swarming upon its weakest member; blood spurting thin as water, leaking thick as honey. Panicked, I ran to my desk, grabbed the book, and shoved it into my trash can, beneath the tissues and papers, but even that wasn’t enough. I snuck the can outside my bedroom door and closed myself in. I remember holding my hand palm-out as some kind of protection. I know that such inclinations and incidents may not seem like much, and that they are not my fault, but the fault of circumstances beyond my control. But to this day, I suspect that I planted the seeds of my own suffering without having any notion of consequence.
The doctors rarely used clinical terms to address my sleeping problem. They said I had nerves, and recommended to Matka pharmaceuticals with futuristic names. I never told anyone about William P. Harding because, from the beginning, they seemed determined to be the ones with the answers; I’ve never known any profession to be surer about its own expertise than the one with the stethoscope.
There is a possibility, although I try not to think about it, that my children will inherit this madness. In other ways I’ve given them the most I could. I wanted to give them everything. I tried to teach William and Gillian about the Bible and Virgil and the importance of language, which is not easy to do with their mother being the way that she is; but they are quick studies, and I can tell they have the potential for outstanding intellects. It’s too early yet to tell if there’s something unsavory lurking, but if there is, I haven’t seen it. No one deserves this, least of all those two. If I could do anything, anything at all, I’d ensure that their realities remain strong as bricks, as solid as diamonds.
Naturally, insomnia interfered with my schoolwork, which I became too dull-headed for; and when Matka, upon receiving my report card, tentatively visited my bedroom after dinner to ask if everything was all right, I vaguely gave a half-truth, which was that I was having trouble sleeping. A groove folded between her eyebrows. She sighed, the paper in her hands creasing into her lap, and said, “I’ll have to tell your father.” She meant the grades, of course, never the insomnia. And Matka turned to me and smiled one of those smiles propped up by many things, but not by happiness. She loved me all her life, but I did wonder how many children she would have wanted if she’d been able. At that age I knew only that I’d never have a brother or sister, let alone a pack of them, but not why. She did tell me later, when I returned to Greenpoint with Daisy, that she’d had a near-fatal hemorrhage when I was born, and everything had been removed—uterus, fallopian tubes, ovaries—which saved her, but meant I would always be her only child. She said this bitterly, tapping a cigarette into the sink, her hands trembling so that she almost dropped it in with the dishes. That medical crisis also made her sick, I realized later, as a consequence of depleted estrogen.
Insomnia. Wolves. Matka’s concern for me. My grades. The war had ended by then, and the atmosphere at home and school seemed perpetually on the brink of a great unraveling. No one close to us had died. My parents’ closest friends, the Pawlowskis, were childless, though apparently Mr. Pawlowski had a nephew from Long Island who lost a leg in combat, and some of the kids I knew from St. Jadwiga had lost a brother or had a brother newly, and I assumed happily, home. For us the end of the war meant that the Nowak Piano Company would return to making pianos, although whether those pianos would then find buyers was a new anxiety to be conquered. This question gave Ojciec ulcers, which I’m sure Matka was disinclined to make worse with my disappointing report card.
But as she’d said, she did have to tell him, and he was unhappy. I’d always been decently athletic and scholastically impressive, and the new Cs and B-minuses bewildered him.
“What’s gone wrong with you?” he asked at breakfast. “It’s not a girl, is it?”
“No.”
Ojciec was a small man, not where I got my height; he was compact and had a thin flop of dark blond hair across his pate, which he