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By Root 1218 0

rumpus. Margaret saw him as a peripheral blur: “He would jump around, always on the go.” Concentration was focused on the afternoon block of programming: “I had about four hours of programming every day,” he would soberly recount to a television psychologist thirty years in the future. “Ohhh, I had all kinds of different shows—adventure shows, horror shows, old-time movies, cartoons. I would just run around the room playing all the parts.” Eventually, he would break the afternoon down into eight half-hour shows. He would sing and dance, play heroes and apes, judges and defendants, villains and monsters, damsels and dogs, cowboys and … “I don’t remember much of them. I remember one that was like an old-time silent movie show—’cause in those days on television they showed a lot of silent movies instead of cartoons. I didn’t understand what was going on in these movies—all I knew was that these people were walking around faster than usual, with music playing. So when I was re-creating them for myself, there wasn’t any plot. It was just me for a half hour walking around fast and doing all kinds of faces and falling down and stuff like that….

“My parents would say, ‘Why don’t you go out and play?’ And I would say, ‘I can’t! I’m putting on my shows!’”

Having gone inward when his grandfather died, he stayed inward, coming out only when alone. But he had also found a friend who lived across the backyard—she was real; her name was Cathy Bernard-and he showed her the magic of inwardness, how to find secret places, the thrill of shared sanctuary, of hiding from. “He had a great imagination. We’d make tunnels in the backyard. This kid across the street had a tree house and we’d hang out there and make up stories and play house. There was another kid who lived next door to me who we hated. Andy would come up with all kinds of ways to torment him. We would make different bird sounds from the tree to confuse him. We’d say he could come over to play and then we’d hide. The kid would just go nuts. Andy liked finding ways to keep people from knowing where we were. He was into getting people wound up. My family had a basement with catacombs and we were always going in there. Sometimes he’d sneak down there unbeknownst to me and he’d make weird noises to scare us. One time, a house down the block caught fire and Andy said, ‘Let’s go jump on the fire engine!’ So we hid on the engine while the firemen were putting out the fire. They didn’t find us until they had pulled away and gone a few blocks.

“Mostly, I remember a lot of hiding in the family cars, then scaring the hell out of his parents when they looked inside. We’d crouch down in the back and his parents would be yelling, ‘Andy, where are you!’ They had someplace to go or something to do. And he’d say, ‘Let ’em go crazy, let ’em find us!’ And his mother—she was a funny lady, too—she used to get so mad, and then she’d laugh because we were right there all along. The truly funny part was she never figured out that that’s where we always were!”

Michael: “One Saturday night, we were outside playing with Margaret. My parents were going to a formal dance in Manhattan and it’s getting dusky and Margaret told us it’s time to come in. Suddenly, ‘Where is Andy?’ She couldn’t find Andy.” Margaret: “His mother and pop left for their dinner and it’s dark and no Andy. I’m going around to different houses saying, ‘Andy! Andy!’ Nobody’d seen Andy. I got frightened.” Stanley: “As we’re just about to go over the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge into Manhattan, I look in my rearview mirror—and I see this dirty little face popping up with a big, big grin, like, ‘Surprise!’ I was in shock. I didn’t know what to do. I said, ‘Janice, guess who’s in the car with us?’ She turns around and screams! What are we gonna do? We’re late to this dinner dance, this kid is in the car, we’re thirty-five minutes from home, Margaret’s got to be frantic. So we immediately go to a telephone, call Margaret and tell her we have Andy with us. And then we call my mother-in-law, who now had an apartment in the city, and thank God she