Kafka Was the Rage_ A Greenwich Village Memoir - Anatole Broyard [27]
He shifted on the love seat so that he was wedged into one corner. He looked uncomfortable now, strained. He was squinting and his head was pulled back in a peculiar way. It was an odd attitude and yet it was familiar, another image from our album. I could see this image clearly because my mind was abnormally alert. Sheri’s presence in the room electrified me and it took me only a minute to go back twenty years and identify that expression on my father’s face. It was his “walking on his hands” look.
When we lived in New Orleans, my father would sometimes walk on his hands. A spirit would seize him and he would throw himself down as if he was diving, and then all of a sudden he would be standing on his hands. On a Saturday afternoon when people brought rocking chairs out in front of their houses and everyone was feeling sociable and relaxed, my father would go down on his hands and walk over to one of his friends on the block. Though they would laugh, nobody seemed to think this was strange. Men were more simply physical in those days, athletic in odd ways. Once, on a bet, my father walked all the way around the block on his hands.
The first time I saw my father on his hands, when I was only two or three, I was terrified. It was as if he had turned the whole world upside down. I was afraid he was never going to get back on his feet again, that he had decided he liked it better down there on his hands, like a dog. He had a funny way of looking at us, too, from down there—not inverted, with his eyes at the bottom of his face, as I had expected at first, but peering up, his head thrown back until it seemed to rest on his shoulder blades. It was this looking up that frightened me so, because the veins in his neck stood out as if they’d burst.
Standing on his hands put a lot of strain in his face. He strained and smiled at the same time, and I thought he was like a monstrous spider scuttling along the ground. Now, wedged into the corner of the couch, he was looking at Sheri this way, as if he was standing on his hands, his neck arched and his head rearing.
Anatole loved to go to school, my mother was saying. According to her, I loved everything. Could it be true? Until I refused to wear it, she sent me to school in a pongee shirt with a ruffled collar. He hated to miss a day of school, she said. One time when he had a cold, I kept him home and he cried and cried.
I cried? Who was this boy? I never heard of him.
He was so skinny, my mother said. I couldn’t do anything with him. He wouldn’t drink milk unless it had Hershey’s chocolate syrup in it. I used to get tonics from the doctor to try to build him up. In the summertime, I bought him books to keep him inside during the hottest part of the day. He was crazy about Tarzan books.
She was going too far. Sheri was beginning to tire of this skinny, loving, namby-pamby boy. She shifted in my mother’s lap and her eyes glinted. The chair they were sitting in was an early version of the Barca-Lounger, with a button on the arm for lowering and raising the back. Now, looking straight at me, smiling, she pushed the button and she and my mother fell back into a horizontal position.
Sheri’s bare legs flew up, and in that split second while they rose, I thought that now we would see—yes, this was what she had come for. She had come to Brooklyn on the subway, and had searched out our house on a map to show my mother and father that the woman I lived with wore no underpants.
It was only at the last moment that she arrested her flying legs and held them straight out before her like a gymnast. But her message was unmistakable. It was a warning—she was warning me, and I knew that I would have to do whatever she wanted. I got up and pulled her off my mother’s lap and she let the album fall to the floor. I raised the back of the chair and pretended she had pushed the button by accident.
It’s late, I said.