shoulder bag is full of Indian clubs, rubber rings, lacrosse balls and other paraphernalia of the professional juggler. He’s on his way to a juggling gig, he tells me, a Lions benefit in Evanston. “Why don’t you come along and keep me company?” he says, and I say, “Why not?”
It’s Saturday. I’m on my way home from a morning of marketing, my shopping bag bulging with sensuous squashes and gourds. The old restlessness has come back, my spiritual eczema as Brownie calls it. (Brownie is out of town, as usual on weekends, scouting the countryside for Plastic Man comics and for first editions of Hemingway or Fitzgerald—or second editions or third—which are becoming harder and harder to find.)
At the Lions benefit I sit on the sidelines and watch Stephen perform. A big man, six-foot-four, he wears loose cotton clothes and, on his feet, white sneakers. Soundlessly, with wonderful agility, he moves about on large white feet, elegant and clownish. He has the gift of enchantment, my Stephen, the ability to cast a spell over the children, some of whom are in wheelchairs, and to put the awkward, hovering parents at their ease. He fine tunes them to laughter. “If you watch very, very carefully,” he tells the audience with lowered voice, “you might see me drop this club on my toe.” An instant later he deliberately drops one and hops up and down in voiceless agony while the children howl and applaud. Then he executes a quick recovery and goes into his five-ball shower, followed by his reverse cascade, and finishing with the famous triple-torch fire feat. I’ve seen itbefore, but today he performs with special artistry. He’s a master of his comic trade, this thirty-five-year-old son of a billionaire grain investor.
Clever men create themselves, but clever women, it seems to me, are created by their mothers. Women can never quite escape their mothers’ cosmic pull, not their lip-biting expectations or their faulty love. We want to please our mothers, emulate them, disgrace them, oblige them, outrage them, and bury ourselves in the mysteries and consolations of their presence. When my mother and I are in the same room we work magic on each other: I grow impossibly cheerful and am guilty of reimagined naiveté and other indulgent stunts, and my mother’s sad, helpless dithering becomes a song of succour. Within minutes, we’re peddling away, the two of us, a genetic sewing machine that runs on limitless love. It’s my belief that between mothers and daughters there is a kind of blood-hyphen that is, finally, indissoluble. (All this, of course, is explored in Chapter Three of my book
The Female Prism
, with examples from nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature liberally supplied.)
The experience of men is somehow different. I look at Stephen and at Brownie and all the other men I know and marvel at the distance they manage to put between themselves and their fathers. Stephen’s father, whom I met only once, presides in a boardroom so high up in the Corn Exchange that he might be on a mountain top, while Stephen, his only son, this big, soft-footed boy, blithely plucks wooden clubs out of the air, rides the subway, and lives in a rented dump in Maywood, unwilling, it would seem, to enjoy the material plenty showered on him. And Brownie, his wonderful little scowl, his scowling eyes and scowly concentration—I’m sure these are his own inventions and not an inheritance from his poor but smileyfather (as I imagine him) tramping around up there in his loamy fields. Brownie’s life, like Stephen’s, seems designed to avoid his father’s destiny, while mine is drawn with the same broad pencil as my mother’s.
Stephen asks me how my mother is. This is later, over toasted sandwiches and beer in a downtown bar. I explain about the lump in her side, how it sometimes keeps her awake at night, but at least it doesn’t seem to be growing, and how next week she’ll check into the hospital for a day of tests.
It’s Saturday. I’m on my way home from a morning of marketing, my shopping bag bulging with sensuous squashes and gourds. The old restlessness has come back, my spiritual eczema as Brownie calls it. (Brownie is out of town, as usual on weekends, scouting the countryside for Plastic Man comics and for first editions of Hemingway or Fitzgerald—or second editions or third—which are becoming harder and harder to find.)
At the Lions benefit I sit on the sidelines and watch Stephen perform. A big man, six-foot-four, he wears loose cotton clothes and, on his feet, white sneakers. Soundlessly, with wonderful agility, he moves about on large white feet, elegant and clownish. He has the gift of enchantment, my Stephen, the ability to cast a spell over the children, some of whom are in wheelchairs, and to put the awkward, hovering parents at their ease. He fine tunes them to laughter. “If you watch very, very carefully,” he tells the audience with lowered voice, “you might see me drop this club on my toe.” An instant later he deliberately drops one and hops up and down in voiceless agony while the children howl and applaud. Then he executes a quick recovery and goes into his five-ball shower, followed by his reverse cascade, and finishing with the famous triple-torch fire feat. I’ve seen itbefore, but today he performs with special artistry. He’s a master of his comic trade, this thirty-five-year-old son of a billionaire grain investor.
Clever men create themselves, but clever women, it seems to me, are created by their mothers. Women can never quite escape their mothers’ cosmic pull, not their lip-biting expectations or their faulty love. We want to please our mothers, emulate them, disgrace them, oblige them, outrage them, and bury ourselves in the mysteries and consolations of their presence. When my mother and I are in the same room we work magic on each other: I grow impossibly cheerful and am guilty of reimagined naiveté and other indulgent stunts, and my mother’s sad, helpless dithering becomes a song of succour. Within minutes, we’re peddling away, the two of us, a genetic sewing machine that runs on limitless love. It’s my belief that between mothers and daughters there is a kind of blood-hyphen that is, finally, indissoluble. (All this, of course, is explored in Chapter Three of my book
The Female Prism
, with examples from nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature liberally supplied.)
The experience of men is somehow different. I look at Stephen and at Brownie and all the other men I know and marvel at the distance they manage to put between themselves and their fathers. Stephen’s father, whom I met only once, presides in a boardroom so high up in the Corn Exchange that he might be on a mountain top, while Stephen, his only son, this big, soft-footed boy, blithely plucks wooden clubs out of the air, rides the subway, and lives in a rented dump in Maywood, unwilling, it would seem, to enjoy the material plenty showered on him. And Brownie, his wonderful little scowl, his scowling eyes and scowly concentration—I’m sure these are his own inventions and not an inheritance from his poor but smileyfather (as I imagine him) tramping around up there in his loamy fields. Brownie’s life, like Stephen’s, seems designed to avoid his father’s destiny, while mine is drawn with the same broad pencil as my mother’s.
Stephen asks me how my mother is. This is later, over toasted sandwiches and beer in a downtown bar. I explain about the lump in her side, how it sometimes keeps her awake at night, but at least it doesn’t seem to be growing, and how next week she’ll check into the hospital for a day of tests.
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