Ragtime - E.L. Doctorow [40]
The boy thought of his grandfather as a discarded treasure. He accepted the stories as images of truth, and therefore as propositions that could be tested. He found proof in his own experience of the instability of both things and people. He could look at the hairbrush on the bureau and it would sometimes slide off the edge and fall to the floor. If he raised the window in his room it might shut itself at the moment he thought the room was getting cold. He liked to go to the moving picture shows downtown at the New Rochelle Theatre on Main Street. He knew the principles of photography but saw also that moving pictures depended on the capacity of humans, animals or objects to forfeit portions of themselves, residues of shadow and light which they left behind. He listened with fascination to the Victrola and played the same record over and over, whatever it happened to be, as if to test the endurance of a duplicated event.
And then he took to studying himself in the mirror, perhaps expecting some change to take place before his eyes. He could not see that he was taller than he had been even a few months before, or that his hair was darkening. Mother noticed his new attention to himself and understood it as the vanity of a boy beginning to think of himself as a man. Certainly he had passed the age of sailor suits. Always discreet, she said nothing. But she was very pleased. In fact he continued the practice not from vanity but because he discovered the mirror as a means of self-duplication. He would gaze at himself until there were two selves facing one another, neither of which could claim to be the real one. The sensation was of being disembodied. He was no longer anything exact as a person. He had the dizzying feeling of separating from himself endlessly. He would entrance himself so deeply in this process that he would be unable to come out of it even though his mind was lucid. He would have to rely on some outside stimulus, a loud noise or a change in the light coming through the window, to capture his attention and make him whole again.
And what of his own father, the burly self-confident man who had gone away, and came back gaunt and hunched and bearded? Or of his uncle shedding his hair and his lassitude? Down at the bottom of the Broadview Avenue hill one day the city fathers unveiled a bronze statue of some old Dutch governor, a fierce-looking man with a square-topped hat, a cape, pantaloons and buckled shoes. The family was on hand for that. There were other statues in the city parks and the boy knew them all. He believed that statues were one way of transforming humans and in some cases horses. Yet even statues did not remain the same but turned different colors or lost bits and pieces of themselves.
It was evident to him that the world composed and recomposed itself constantly in an endless process of dissatisfaction.
The winter turned extremely cold and dry and the ponds of New Rochelle became ideal for skating. On Saturdays and Sundays, Mother and Younger Brother and the boy would skate on the pond in the woods at the bottom of Paine Avenue, the street adjoining Broadview. Younger Brother would skate off by himself, taking long solemn and graceful strides across the ice, his hands behind his back, his head bowed. Mother wore a fur hat and a long black coat and held her hands in a muff and skated with her son holding her arm. She hoped to divert him from his lonely indoor pursuits. It was a merry scene with children and adults from all over the neighborhood skating over the white ice, long colorful scarves streaming from their necks, cheeks and noses red. People fell and laughed and were picked up. Dogs struggled to keep their balance as they followed the children about. There was the constant cut-cut of the skate blades on the ice.