“Hee hee hee,” cries my eldest son from his wheelchair, “but is it true, pop—that for nearly twelve months no one noticed you at all?”
Well, sure . . . but let me tell you: right from the start I was as hopeful as Pandora and as jolly as a sandboy. The world at that time was no more and no less than the film 2001 by Kubrick. The lodgers moved in, making the place their own. My mother took me with her wherever she went, beaming up high. (No less, I repeat, than a secret flickering filmic Odyssey whose director liked to shout “Do Your Own Thing!” No less than the fields of Tyuratam where a boy from Klushino—Have you heard of Gagarin?—was about to be put into elliptical orbit)
My mother and I went swimming together below the cliffs of Columbia, riding the sea wash like a brown manta, shimmering and round and bathing to silence. During the long evenings of 1961 Maxim lay awake inside her while she streamed silver tulle along the corridors and a bay named after that least loquacious animals, the pig, became famous. At certain times of each month she deemed to set the tides of the South Steyne Oceanarium rising, swirling currents into still waters, and sand also, creating littoral drift and strong rips, tubular swells and tsunamis and, in doing so, unknowingly whipping up my briny amniotic sea too and . . . and I was secretly with her when she sprang up wild and impassioned into her dormer window.
Record this: I did not cry out! I (who had been instantaneously endowed with a seemingly unfathomable equation of algebraic paternity) did not flinch. I did not even call her attention to the wiggling shoots of a glittering and ductile umbilical which grew in tiny spiraling motions in the nucleic fluid around me.
Summer lengthened and became autumn, autumn became winter and winter . . . so that before I was entirely aware of myself the bitumen of South Steyne had begun to bubble and ooze again and the sand became so hot that surf lifesavers had to put pink thongs on their soles. Maxim’s grokking grandmother, large as she’d become, took this spring heatwave to mean that she must unburden herself of some of the weight of the widowhood that had befallen her. So she began to let loose into the atmosphere all manner of ancient history. Beneath mosquito net, wearing only a brocade brassiere and great flapping lace bloomers, she sat in her tropical garden and told cool sea stories:
“Recall the inquisitive navigators who plotted sea routes between Goa and Timor, Cook who sailed south to observe the solitary Transit of Venus, leaving the sheviks in Murmansk with clouds in their instruments, and Columbus who died alone, haunted by a faux pas in Cuba.”
She repeated the generally unknown story of Chief Rocket Designer Korolev (because she was fascinated by anonymity and she liked the bit where Korolev, the anonymous genius, freezes the air and carries it around in his pocket like a square of crusty koklaten he’s saving for lunch). She reminded everyone that she herself had once driven solely by compass and she pointed to an Austin A40 and said, “There’s life in the old girl yet!”
“Adventure!” she cried out, and also: “Three cheers for the pioneering spirit!” She let fly a guffaw Ho ho! and announced that as well as being newly appointed to the Standing Committee on Seaside Development and the Association of Beachfront Landowners she also, after all, belonged to the auxiliary of the Returned Servicemen’s League, and though she could not deny that Simpson’s donkey was a remarkable beast, she sure was hearing some crazy reports about the GIs in Dong Hoi.
The fact was: she’d become much wealthier and had her quaint ways and she liked to entertain. She was large and her hair was magnificent and she’d begun already to acknowledge new sights and new sounds.
“That,” she said, hearing music in the wind, “is a note sung in the head register, legato.”
twannnnngggg
“Do you hear, sounds like the kid’s almost got that old Gretsch licked?”
twannngggg tawang now as through this world I ramble/I zee lots of funny men/Some will rob you with a six-gun/And some with a fountain pen . . . twunnnggg
“Gees, too bad. Least he’s not singing ‘Never On Sunday.’ Maybe this Zimmerman kid’ll make us proud.”
Sure thing, because my widowed grandmother provided a Columbia in which he was welcome, her first act of widowhood being to advertise:
*ROOMS AVAILABLE*
(Applicants Encouraged to Apply)
and to rent out bedrooms to three lodgers who arrived in the first weeks of 1962, as if on the sea-breeze.
“Blow, huh, blow!”
“Fill this monstrous old so-n-so house with—persons!”
. . . Because the Widow Creamcheese had a brand new idea of her own and this was it: “The universe is a kind of big house, (Howtosay?) a homeland, in which some stars maybe die but many more are born.” . . . Which means, Mrs. Zimmerman (who was secretly, we all knew, Astolpho the Fun Pier Seer) once explained, that we Columbians were right in tune with all twelve homes of the astrological heavens, those six in descendency to the south and those six in ascendancy to the north: the home of life, the home of fortune and riches; the home of brethren; the home of parents and relatives; the home of health; the home of marriage; the home of death; the home of religion; the home of dignities; the home of friends and benefactors and the home of mystery and uncertainty . . .
But which one of us hadn’t noticed there was a new flicker in a widow’s eyes? Dare I say, fantastic new constellations forming in the gaseous thoughts of an impresario—twenty-five years of raising grey eyes to galactic stages, Starlight Room, The Orbit Bar and Galaxy Grill, the black holes of dressing rooms (by definition unable to be seen!); two and a half decades of nebulous driving between two-bit towns and South Steyne shimmy shimmy joints, suffering the occultations of bigger names eclipsing Bibbidi Boo, meteors and comets, the rocketing to stardom of the Fontane Sisters and that man’s man, Frank Sinatra.
To paraphrase: after her husband’s death, Maxim’s grandmother was soon on the look-out for rising talent, casting her net into the sea of South Steyne, dangling the glittering hooks of conversation and the lines of inquiry into Magdalen’s Five-O salon and Arnhold’s butchery, into Leacon’s News Agency with its paperboy’s barrows and signwriting CURRENT AFFAIRS, into the pure white bakery of Mr. Tsvoklovsky until, trolling the late hours of her widowhood, floating through gardens tangled with impossibly fine rain and the screeches of fruit bats overhead, she turned toward Columbia and observed through the windows talent swimming in the futures of her three new lodgers.
“How like Stevin Roszak he looks!” I thought, as craggy young Rosz marched down our Carborundum topped steps on the morning of his appointment as Graduate Teaching Assistant.
“How fine,” said my grandmother, who rushed to the front fence to watch him leave, standing with my mother and I under our pink frangipani in green velveteen skirts and several layers of floral bodice.
In his father’s suit, no less, with a tie and pin from the City University and cuff-links printed with the gears and pinion of the Royal College of Mechanical Engineers and even his long and nodular fingers seemed to smooth out and point forward, their nails being cut uncharacteristically short and his nose had been trimmed of its stiff inner hair and his shoulders were curved over Sure! but also pointed with a milliner’s fold (and no visible sign on his fingers of the glue with which he had been pasting together certain defamatory letters).
Man! Maxim could see from his recondite position that Siemens Roszak was carrying a heavyweight of expectation and family tradition because, after twelve months of unsupervised reading, it was on the good word of his father, the local councilor, that he had been appointed to the Vale School while he studied for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy which entailed certain research on which no unsung embryo could comment but which, it seemed, concerned the roles and applications of the mystic lyrics of one “William Blake,” a town unearthed in Greenwich