Ragtime - E.L. Doctorow [39]
The young man was in mourning. Gradually Evelyn Nesbit had become indifferent to him and when he persisted in his love she had become hostile. Finally one day she had gone off with a professional ragtime dancer. She left a note. They were going to put together an act. Brother brought home to his room in New Rochelle a wooden crate filled with silhouette portraits and a pair of small beige satin shoes that Evelyn had discarded. Once, standing in nothing but these shoes and white embroidered stockings, she had placed her hands on her thighs and stared at him over her shoulder. He lay on his bed for days after his return. At times he would grab himself as if to pull his sex out by the roots. He would pace his room and hold his hands over his ears and hum loudly when he heard her voice. He could not look at the silhouettes. He wanted to pack his heart with gunpowder and blow it up. Without warning one dawn he awoke with her scent in his nostrils. This of all his memories was the most vicious. He ran downstairs and threw the stack of silhouettes and the satin shoes in the trash can. Then he shaved and went off to the flag and fireworks factory.
The silhouette portraits were recovered by his nephew.
15
The boy treasured anything discarded. He took his education peculiarly and lived an entirely secret intellectual life. He had his eye on his father’s Arctic journals but would not attempt to read them unless Father no longer cared about them. In his mind the meaning of something was perceived through its neglect. He looked over the silhouettes, examining them carefully, and chose one of them to hang on the inside of his wardrobe door. It was a study of the artist’s most frequent model, a girl with hair like a helmet and the posture of someone who might run at any moment. She wore the battered high-lace shoes and sagging socks of poor children. He hid the rest of the silhouette collection in the attic. He was alert not only to discarded materials but to unexpected events and coincidences. He learned nothing at school but he did well because nothing was demanded of him. His teacher was an iron-haired woman who trained her students in declamation and clapped her hands as they practiced in their notebooks the curved lines that were thought to encourage good penmanship. At home he showed a fondness for the Motor Boys books and rarely missed an issue of Wild West Weekly, and for some reason these tastes, which the family found unexceptional, were a comfort to them. Mother suspected he was a strange child, although she shared this sense of him with no one, not even Father. Any indication that her son was ordinary heartened her. She wished he had friends. Father was still not himself and Younger Brother was too tormented by his own concerns to be of use, so it was left to Grandfather to cultivate what might be the boy’s oddity or merely his independence of spirit.
The old man was very thin and stooped, and he emitted a mildewed smell, possibly because he had few clothes and refused to buy or accept anything new. Also his eyes were constantly watering. But he would sit in the parlor and tell the boy stories from Ovid. They were stories of people who became animals or trees or statues. They were stories of transformation. Women turned into sunflowers, spiders, bats, birds; men turned into snakes, pigs, stones and even thin air. The boy did not know he was hearing Ovid, and it would not have mattered if he had known. Grandfather’s stories proposed to him that the forms of life were volatile and that everything in the world could