doubly trapped: he couldn’t leave the trap behind. He could go in the other room, and the trap would follow him. He could go to sleep and wake up the next morning: the trap would still be there. He could walk anywhere, run anywhere, and his hand would still be trapped. His parents couldn’t understand. They would offer to cheat on his Darvon schedule, but it wasn’t the pain. They didn’t get it, and he could not explain. So he was trapped in yet another dimension: he could not communicate what was wrong. Triply trapped. He cried a lot.
Anna tried to distract him: if he would put his left knee to his mouth, she told him, he could talk to Grandpa Jacobo in Italy. Grandpa Jacobo would feel a tickling in his left knee, and put his ear to it and listen, and he would be able to hear Arnold. Then, if Arnold put his ear to his knee and listened very carefully, he might hear Grandpa Jacobo talking back to him.
Could he talk English to Grandpa? Arnold asked. Would Grandpa talk English back? Anna assured him that since she had moved to America, Grandpa Jacobo had been studying English. She told him to try it and see. Curious, and ever wanting to please, Arnold gave it a go. He rolled up his pajama leg to expose his left knee (the left knee his mother lacked) and whispered into the joint, “Grandpa, can you hear me?”
“Now put your ear to your knee, and let me know what he says.”
Arnold listened very carefully.
“Close the window,” he told his mother, “so it will be more quiet.” She did, and he listened for two silent minutes.
“Well?”
“He says he can hear me, and he wants to know how everyone is, and if I go to school yet. He says he and Grandma Lucetta miss me and miss you and Daddy, and they want us to come visit them next summer. He says he will take us on a trip into the big mountains. And he says that Pepi died last week.”
“Our dog?”
“Yes. Pepi died last week from being old.”
This was a little uncanny. The missing, and the trip to the mountains—OK—a child could make that up. But Pepi . . . She called her parents that very morning.
Pepi had died nine days before.
. . .
Arnold spent much of his convalescence talking to Grandpa Jacobo. But as soon as the bandage came off, he forgot about the connection and went about his normal four-year-old business—asking questions. Anna would read to him—picture books about animals.
“Why is a fox called a fox?” he asked.
“It’s called a fox just in English. In Italy, it’s called un volpe.”
“But it’s a fox? The same fox?”
“It’s the same fox, but it has a different name.”
“How can it have a different name if it’s the same?”
“I don’t know. It just does. Italians call things differently than Americans.”
He began to cry.
Or, another time:
“Would you drink a glass of my spit? If I filled a glass with my spit?”
“No! Don’t be disgusting.”
“Would you drink a glass of your own spit? You spit into a glass until it’s full, then you drink it?”
“Arnold, enough of spit!”
“Would you?”
“No!”
“But what’s wrong with spit? You swallow your spit and you don’t mind. You swallow lots of your own spit.”
“Arnold, zitto!”
“Spit, spit, spit!” and more tears.
The child began to perceive a rigid stupidity among adults, even his own parents, who knew most things. Did time have a beginning? he wanted to know when he was learning about clocks. If you went back and back, would you get to a place where there was no more back? He asked every grownup he met—it was his question of the month. No one would take it seriously. “I don’t know.” Period. Or, “Who knows?” Why weren’t they perplexed, or even interested? This was no idea-question, it was a real question. He was trying to understand. Surely grownups must know simple things like that. Did time ever begin? Or will it ever end? They just took the whole thing for granted. “That’s how things are. Talking isn’t going to change them. Discussing is a waste of time waste of time waste of time.” What else did he have to do?
At four and three-quarters he hit the books for answers. He didn’t know how to read, but he could do research anyway. There was a big book filled with pictures of paintings and sculptures and buildings, the 1926 edition of Art Through the Ages. There was the Bible and La Bibbia Santa. Did God speak English or Italian? If He was so smart, maybe He spoke both. There was La Divina Commedia, with scary etchings; Italian Through Pictures, a book with funny stick people pointing at themselves; The Blue Guide to Italy with a string bookmark at the map of Ferrara, page 262. There was a book called The Naked and the Dead with no pictures at all, neither naked people nor dead ones. And that was it. Some cooking magazines.
His favorite was Art Through the Ages. It had so much to show him—not just the world of artists and architects but the whole possibility of Otherness other-than-Mansfield. There was a picture of a big church in Milan, in Italy, near where his mama had lived, and Milan was very far away. And even if you could only see one building, for Arnold it was proof that Milan existed, proof that Italy existed, proof that even far away, things existed.
Nobody ever thought of reading Art Through the Ages to him, and when he asked for it, he was told it wasn’t a reading book, it was a looking-at book. So he looked and looked at the pictures, and he invented stories about them, for example, a story about the naked lady standing on a seashell, and why she was standing on a seashell, and why she was naked. His father didn’t like him looking at naked ladies, but his mother let him anyway. She had Botticelli hands. When she looked at the book with him, she told him about how this building or that painting had been destroyed in the war. In this way he learned about destruction.
Arnold was determined to learn to read since, except for Art Through the Ages, there seemed to be in books many more words than pictures. So the words must be more important, right? He could make up his own stories, but bookwords would tell him the real stories.
It was an epiphany. The marks on the pages turned out to be instructions about sounds. If he could learn the sounds and put them together, he would wind up with—words. Amazing! Wouldn’t it have been easier just to have little pictures for everything? Stick figures like the ones in the book to learn Italian? But no. This was the way the grownups did it, and they must be right. George and Anna taught him the alphabet. He cried when he found out that “c” could be pronounced “k” or “s.” Why do you need “c” at all if it doesn’t have its own sound? His parents didn’t know. When “ph” and “qu” showed up, Arnold didn’t cry but became furious, then petulant. By this time, he was beginning to sense some conspiracy of the old against the young. If you can’t trust grownups, whom can you trust?
But “c,” “g,” “ph,” and “qu” became finally minor annoyances—exceptions
