sound sequence popped into place, he experienced a tingling up the back of his neck. Sounding out words: what a clever and good thing to do. Noble. Like scientists and detectives. The act of reading was as fascinating as the content—but daunting, too. Would he now have to read everything, of which he was sure there was much? Would he be allowed to stop if he wanted to? Not yet five, he was cognizant of some anticipatory, menacing commitment.
And if he could read, he would have to write. Assiduous, he practiced his alphabet. His first written note—vetted by his horrified mother—was to his friend, Sam. It read, “YU AR A GRATE BIG DOODEE HED, AND I WILL FLUSH YU DOWIN THE TOYLET.” She wouldn’t let him send it.
Why not? Why not? He had worked so hard on it. The letters were all recognizable—even neat. Anna explained that “doody” was not a nice word, and that Sam would not like being called a doody-head and might not want to be friends with him. “But he calls me a doody-head.” And, again, he burst out crying. Eventually, Arnold gathered that there were good words, which you were allowed to say and write, and bad words, which you were not. But what made a good word good and a bad word bad? Grownups were nuts.
Needless to say, when he started school that fall of 1956, he found Dick and Jane, whose mother had two legs, not one and a half, insufferably stupid. They seemed to live in a world only vaguely related to his own, some kind of harmless, cute, safe place, without dirty words, without the bombs and dead people his mother would talk about, without the niggers who could be his friends after school but who couldn’t go to school with him, and whom people hanged on the flagpole.
“Mama,” he called out during a self-assigned homework session, “you know what?”
“What?” Anna turned delightedly to her little scholar.
“There’s no story in the Dick and Jane story.”
“What do you mean? Doesn’t the dog run with the ball, and . . .”
“I mean like the story of the naked lady on the seashell, or the girl turning into a tree.”
Though Anna found them charming, such thoughts did not bode well for his career at Mansfield Elementary. He did not love school; he loved his own gathering of words, which revealed to him the infinite world of things, the many forms of the specific, of the substance and strategy of the world. He was the best reader in his class, he was popular, he got the best marks in all his subjects, but he became expert in deceit. Verbosity, exile, and cunning.
Four
You will remain in truth as long as you maneuver within its limits.
Edmond Jabès, Hand and Dial
Unlike Stephen Dedalus and his own son, Arnold’s father had a name that would fly.
George Andrew Hitler, born in 1924, grew up at a time when it was fine to be so named. Until the age of nine, his last name was neither here nor there—just another moniker, that of his own father, Tom. From nine to eighteen, the homonym was noticed by only a minority of North Texans whose newspaper reading went beyond the sports page, the funnies, the local letters and obits. And for them, it was Adolf Hitler, if anyone, who seemed the imposter, some German politician who had made off with George’s good name. Until Anna, there were no Jews around to take umbrage: in Mansfield, they knew that Bill Monroe was not Marilyn Monroe, that Floyd Jefferson, the nigger car-washer at Cluny’s Garage, was likely unrelated to Thomas, and that Adolf Hitler’s escapades could do nothing to besmirch George, a hardworking mill hand and patriotic veteran, a man who later married the woman he had wounded. Texans understood the difference.
. . .
By the time he was three, Arnold was noticing differences too, not only that between boys and girls but between his mother and everyone else. He’d become expert in helping wrap her stump and settle it into the container of her new prosthesis, in buckling it behind her right hip and helping her adjust the tension of the articulated knee. As she learned to walk, he would coach, “Kick it up, kick it up,” just as he heard the man at the hospital do when his mom was on the parallel bars. With four-and-a-half-year-old seriousness, he advised her, “The more vigorously you walk, the more resistance you will want.” She found it hilarious. He didn’t know why.
“Kick it up, kick it up,” became the secret of his success, first as a fast-running kid and later as an all-star quarterback who often had to run. There were few who could catch him, and even fewer who could stop him, so hard did he pump those long, muscular legs. In times of stress, some men think back upon their mothers. In Arnold’s case, sitting on his mama’s knee was enough to inspire his running.
His friend, Sam, was pretty smart, too—at least Arnold thought so. Especially when Sam, six, sat Arnold, five, down for a December explanation of the facts of life. At first, Arnold was incredulous. “Git outta here,” he averred. “Grownups would never do a dirty thing like that!” But Sam teased and titillated and awed and finally reasoned with him enough for Arnold to consider it a hypothesis to be checked with other kids, and, if possible, tested himself, or directly observed. His sixth birthday, then, embraced a secret “now I am a man” quality usually reserved for bar mitzvah celebrations.
Arnold was a Christmas-day child, one of a cohort famous for feeling gypped. Their birthdays have been subsumed in something so much greater than they, their annual gift quotients are generally half that of their friends, and when relative-visiting occurs, it is for Christmas dinner with a little birthday thrown in. That was why Arnold had grabbed the “nigger” demonstration as an early birthday event just for him.
His real sixth birthday proved to be quite special. Under the tree were two packages from Italy. The more obviously significant one was from Nonno Jacobo—an inexpensive but still elegant set of chess pieces with green felt bottoms, contained in a wooden box with a sliding top. With it, a hinged wooden chessboard and a set of instructions in Italian. The package said, “This is birthday present, not Christmas present.” The more subtly significant one was from Nonna Lucetta, marked, “This is Christmas present, not birthday present.” It was a child-sized Italian sailor suit, about which more anon.
It fell to Anna to teach him chess. Who else could read the instructions? They learned the moves together, and after a few weeks the family chess club was joined by George, who bought a book in English.
Anna and George were dumbfounded at Arnold’s insights. He seemed to be driving some sleek mental chess machine along a highway without a speed limit, destination unknown. Within a month of occasional games, both mother and father had given up all pretense of “letting him win.” Now each was struggling for self-respect. How could this little upstart who could barely read or spell, who got subtraction wrong, who was completely innocent of multiplication and division—how could this mere child beat the pants off them when they were trying as hard as they could to win? In February, Arnold suggested that he play both of them at the same time, first as a team, then, after he had won three games, with Anna on the chess board and George on a crayoned-in sheet of paper, using shirt cardboard cut into little chessmen.
There comes a point in every parent’s life when the subtle competition of master versus upstart gives way to frank and admiring defeat. But at age six? It was too early to concede. George, the more competitive, suggested his son play him blindfolded, a chess master’s trick he had heard about during the war. When he was soundly whupped, he upped the ante. Would Arnold play both him and Anna blindfolded?
When they each went down to defeat, they announced it was time to have a little talk. Arnold was petrified they were going to quiz him about what he knew about penises and vaginas,
