The Book of Air and Shadows - Michael Gruber [23]
Imogen, my daughter, is thirteen. She has straw blond hair and gray eyes and looks so like her mother that she might have been budded from the maternal stem instead of being generated by the usual method. This, by the way, seems to be a peculiarity of our family. The Mishkin genes do not work and play well with others. They either dominate totally or leave the field in a huff. Thus I look exactly like my dad, the Jewish refrigerator carton, while my brother and sister are blondie rails, recruiting posters for the Hitlerjugend. My son, Nicholas, aged eleven, is an absurd little Jake. When I was courting Amalie, my sister pointed out to me that she looked exactly like a younger version of our mom. I can’t say that I ever saw it, although the coloring and general facial type is similar. German, you could say. When Uncle Paul and Aunt Miri take Imogen out, it is universally assumed that she is their daughter, while when I am with her the average passerby gives us unfriendly looks, as if I were an abducting perve.
As for character, unlike her mother, Imogen is a perfect Narcissus; all others exist but to worship her and if not, watch out! She is an athlete—a swimmer of some talent—and wants to be an actress, an ambition I support, for I consider her unsuited for any other life. I believe she gets this tendency from me. When I was in high school in Brooklyn, a teacher told me that I had a good voice and that I should go out for drama, and I did and got the part of Telegin in Uncle Vanya, a small role, but like all Chekhov roles it can be made memorable. I suppose that they no longer do Chekhov in Brooklyn public high schools, but then they did, along with many other cultural activities that are no longer possible in this current age of brass. Telegin is called Waffles in the play because his face is pocked, and mine at sixteen was a mess too. My big line was “I have forfeited my happiness but I have kept my pride.” Naturally, I fell in love with Gloria Gottleib, who played Sonia and who didn’t know I was alive, etc., but the interesting thing was that even after I was offstage and even after we’d done our three performances in the orange-juice-smelling auditorium, I still felt inhabited by Telegin, and this was wonderful to me, that a made-up person created by a man long dead could in a sense displace my own personality.
I should mention here that until I appeared in this thing I had been a miserable figure, too obscure even to be a butt of mockery. It is relatively easy to disappear in a large urban high school, but I had special reasons for becoming one with the tan tiles of the wall. I was a Catholic kid with a Jewish name and a Nazi grandfather in a school where the aristocracy was intellectual and almost entirely Jewish, plus Izzy the Book, was not unknown to the tabloids at the time as oft indicted, never convicted. I lived in terror of someone (i.e., Gloria Gottleib) making the connection. On top of this, my brother Paul, two years older, was a thug. He announced this, as thugs did then, with the black leather jacket and the collar up in back and the duck’s ass hairdo. Being a nonentity was preferable to being famous as Paulie Mishkin’s brother. At some level I knew that I was protected by his ferocious aura from the light bullying that would’ve been my fate otherwise. Paul insisted that when I got pounded, which was fairly often, the pounder would be him only. The worst fight I ever saw when I was growing up was Paul taking out two guys from a well-known street-fighting gang who had mugged my lunch money on the way to school. He used a brick.
These obsessive images. That’s not what I want to write down at all, although perhaps it’s significant that after this fight,