Report from the Interior (6 page)

It took you a while to understand that not everyone thought the way you did, that there were angry, competitive boys who actively wished you ill, that even when you told the truth, there were those who would refuse to believe you, simply as a matter of principle. You were trusting and openhearted, you always began by assuming the best about others, and more often than not those attitudes were reciprocated by others, which led to many warm friendships when you were a child, and therefore it was especially hard on you when you crossed paths with the occasional mean-spirited boy, a person who rejected the rules of fair-mindedness that you and your friends lived by, who took pleasure in discord and conflict for their own sake. You are talking about ethical conduct here, not just good manners or the social benefits of polite behavior, but something more fundamental than that, the moral bedrock on which everything stands—and without which everything falls. To your mind, there was no greater injustice than to be doubted when you had told the truth, to be called a liar when you hadn’t lied, for there was no recourse then, no way to defend your integrity in the face of your accuser, and the frustration caused by such a moral injury would burn deep into you, continue to burn into you, becoming a fire that could never be extinguished. Your first run-in with that sort of frustration occurred when you were five, during the summer of the heroic Lenny, the smallest of small disputes with another boy at the day camp you attended, so small as to qualify as ridiculously small, but you were a small boy then and the world you lived in was by definition small, and why else would you remember this incident if it hadn’t felt large to you at the time, enormous in its impact, and by that you are referring not to the dispute itself, which was inconsequential, but to the outrage you felt afterward, the sense of betrayal that overwhelmed you when you told the truth and were not believed. The circumstances, such as you remember them—and you remember them well—were as follows: the boys in your group were making preparations for some kind of Indian pageant that was to be staged on the last day of the summer camp session, and among the things you were all supposed to do was construct a ceremonial rattle for the occasion, which consisted of ornamenting a can of Calumet baking powder with several colors of paint, filling the can with dried beans or pebbles, and pushing a stick through a hole in the bottom of the can to serve as a handle. The Calumet can was red, you recall, with a splendid portrait of an Indian chief in profile dominating the front, and you worked diligently on your project, you who had never excelled at art, but this time the results surpassed your expectations, your painted decorations were neat and precise and beautiful, and you felt proud of what you had accomplished. Of all the ceremonial rattles produced by the boys that day, yours was one of the best, if not the very best, but time ran out before anyone could put the finishing touches on the job, which meant that the work would have to be picked up again first thing the following morning. You missed the next day of camp because of a cold, however, and perhaps the day after that as well, and when you finally returned it was the last day, the morning of the pageant. You searched high and low for your masterpiece, but you couldn’t find it, slowly understanding as you sifted through the pile that one of the boys had filched it in your absence. A counselor (not Lenny) pulled another rattle out of the box and told you to use that one instead, which needless to say disappointed you, for this substitute rattle had been done poorly and sloppily, it couldn’t compare with the one you had made, but now you were stuck with this embarrassing piece of work, which everyone would assume you had decorated yourself, and as you marched off to take part in the pageant, you found yourself walking beside a boy named Michael, who was a year older than you were and had been subtly taunting you for the entire summer, treating you as a know-nothing dunce, a five-year-old incompetent, and when you held up the ugly rattle and showed it to Michael, explaining that it wasn’t yours, that you had made a much better one, Michael laughed at you and said, Sure, a likely story, and when you defended yourself by saying no, this one really wasn’t yours, Michael called you a liar and turned his back on you. A trivial matter, perhaps, but how you burned then, and how vast was your frustration to have been wronged in this way, not just because you had been wronged, but because you understood the wrong could never be made right.

Another episode from those early years concerns someone named Dennis, who moved to another town when you were seven or eight and subsequently disappeared from your life for good. With so many events from that time now erased from your memory, you find it interesting that this story, too, should revolve around a question of justice, of fairness, of trying to right a wrong. You believe you were six. Dennis was in your first-grade class, and before long the two of you became close friends. You remember your classmate as a quiet person, good-natured, quick to laugh, but somewhat withdrawn, pensive, as if he were carrying around some secret burden, and yet you admired him for his composure and what struck you as an uncommon air of dignity in someone still so young. Dennis came from a large Catholic family, one of several children, perhaps many children, and because there wasn’t enough money to go around, his parents dressed him in shabby, hand-me-down clothes, ill-fitting shirts and pants inherited from his older brothers. Not a poor family exactly, but a struggling family, occupants of an enormous house that seemed to contain an infinite number of dank, sparsely furnished rooms, and each time you went there for lunch, the food was prepared by Dennis’s father, a kind and amiable man, whose job or profession was unknown to you, but Dennis’s mother was rarely to be seen. She spent her days alone in a downstairs room, and the few times she did make an appearance while you were visiting, she was always in her bathrobe and slippers, hair disheveled, chain-smoking, ornery, with dark circles under her eyes, a scary, witch-like character, you felt, and because you were so young, you had no idea what her problem was, whether she was an alcoholic, for example, or ill, or suffering from some mental or emotional trouble. You felt sorry for Dennis in any case, aggrieved that your friend had been saddled with such a woman for a mother, but of course Dennis never said a word about it, for small children never complain about their parents, not even the worst parents, they simply accept what they have been given and carry on from there. One Saturday, you and Dennis were invited to the birthday party of one of the boys in your class, which probably means that you were seven by then, or about to turn seven. Following the protocol for such occasions, your conscientious mother had supplied you with a present for the birthday boy, a prettily done-up package with bright wrapping paper and colorful ribbons. You and Dennis set out for the party together on foot, but all was not well, for your friend had no present of his own, his parents had neglected to buy him one, and when you saw Dennis studying the package under your arm, you understood how wretched he felt, how ashamed he was to be going to the party empty-handed. The two of you must have talked about it, Dennis must have shared his feelings with you—the humiliation, the embarrassment—but you cannot recall a single word of that conversation. What you do remember is the pity and compassion you felt, the ache of misery that welled up in you when confronted by your friend’s misery, for you loved and admired this boy and couldn’t bear to see him suffer, and so, as much for your sake as for Dennis’s sake, you impulsively handed him your present, telling him that it was his now and that he should give it to the birthday boy when he walked into the house. But what about you? Dennis said. If I take this, then you’ll be the one with nothing to give. Don’t worry, you answered. I’ll tell them I left my present at home, that I forgot to take it with me.

For the most part, you were obedient and well-behaved. Aside from that spontaneous burst of altruism with your friend, you were by no means a saintly child, and you did not make a habit of giving away your belongings in selfless acts of commiseration. You strove to tell the truth at all times, but occasionally you lied to cover up your misdeeds, and if you did not cheat at games or steal from your friends, it wasn’t because you struggled to be good so much as that you never found yourself tempted to do those things. Every now and then, however, in fact only twice that you can recollect with any precision, a perverse impulse would take hold of you, an urge to destroy and mutilate, to sabotage, to smash things to bits, and you would turn around and do something fundamentally out of character, at odds with the self you had come to recognize as your own. In the first instance, which occurred when you were around five, you systematically dismantled the family radio, a large machine from the 1940s packed with glass tubes and six thousand wires, thinking at first that you would be able to put it back together, purposefully deceiving yourself by calling this exercise in vandalism a
scientific experiment,
but as you continued to extract the various parts from the innards of the machine, it soon became clear that rebuilding it was beyond your capacity as a scientist, and yet in spite of that you forged on, maniacally removing every bolt and wire housed within the box, doing it for the simple reason that you knew you weren’t supposed to be doing it, that behavior of this kind was absolutely forbidden. What possessed you to attack that old Philco, to eviscerate it and render it useless, to annihilate it? Were you angry at your parents? Were you striking back at them for some wrong you felt they had done to you, or were you merely in one of those fractious, rebellious moods that sometimes get the better of small children? You have no idea, but you remember that you were soundly punished for what you did, even as you continued to protest your innocence, sticking to the story that your crime had been committed in the pursuit of scientific knowledge. Even more mystifying to you is the episode of the tree, which occurred about a year after the radio rampage, which means you were approximately six at the time, and there you were alone again, grumpily wishing there was someone you could play with, out of sorts, restless, wandering around in the yard behind your house, when it suddenly occurred to you what a good idea it would be to chop down the little fruit tree that stood near the flower bed, the new tree, a poor, scrawny sapling with a trunk so slender you could encircle it with your two hands. Such a small tree wouldn’t pose much of a problem, you thought, and so you went into the garage to hunt for your father’s axe, which turned out to be ancient, no doubt the oldest surviving axe in the Western Hemisphere, with a handle so long it was almost as tall as you were, and a blade so dull, so thick, and so rusted that it probably would have been hard-pressed to dent a stick of butter. On top of that, the axe was heavy, not too heavy to carry into the backyard, perhaps, but once you were in front of the tree, heavy enough to make it difficult to lift above your head, and far too heavy to swing with any force—not the baseball bat you had imagined it would be, but seven bats, twenty bats, and therefore you had trouble keeping it parallel to the ground, couldn’t orient it in a straight line because your wrists and arms were wobbling as you drove the dull blade into the tree, and after six or seven whacks you were so exhausted that you had to give up. You had managed to pierce the bark in a few places, bits of the gray membrane were curled upward to show the fresh green underside and a hint of bare blond wood below, but nothing more than that, your plan to fell the tree had been a total failure, and even the wounds you had inflicted on it would heal in time. Again, the question was: why did you do it? You can’t remember your motive—simply the desire to do it, the need to do it—but you suspect it might have been connected to the story about George Washington and the cherry tree, the essential American myth of your childhood, that inexplicable, confounding tale of young George chopping down the tree for no reason, doing it because he wanted to do it, because it struck him as a good idea, which was precisely what you had felt when you decided to cut down your tree, as if every boy at some point in his childhood were destined to cut down a tree for the pure pleasure of cutting down a tree, but then, of course, George Washington was the father of his country, of your country, and therefore he stood tall and confessed his misdeed to his own father—
I cannot tell a lie
—thus proving himself to be an honest boy, a boy of commendable virtue and moral strength, but you are the father of no country, and therefore you sometimes lied when you were a boy, lied because, unlike George Washington, you could tell a lie when the situation demanded you tell one, even if you knew that God would eventually punish you for it. But better God, you thought, than your parents.

Noble and august, unimpeachable in his honor, venerated by all Americans, Washington had fought a number of important battles on New Jersey ground during the Revolutionary War, and every year your class made a pilgrimage to the general’s headquarters in Morristown, a shrine considered even more holy than the one dedicated to Edison in Menlo Park. The lightbulb and the phonograph were wondrous artifacts, but this white colonial mansion was the heart of America itself, the very seat of Columbia’s glory, and in those early years of your childhood, you were taught to believe that everything about America was good. No country could compare to the paradise you lived in, your teachers told you, for this was the land of freedom, the land of opportunity, and every little boy could dream of growing up to become president. The courageous Pilgrims had crossed the ocean to found a nation out of raw wilderness, and the hordes of settlers who’d followed them had spread the American Eden across an entire continent, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from Canada to Mexico, for Americans were industrious and clever, the most inventive people on earth, and every little boy could dream of growing up to become a rich and successful man. It was true that slavery had been a bad idea, but Lincoln had freed the slaves, and by now that unfortunate error was a thing of the past. America was perfect. America had won the war and was in charge of the world, and the only bad person it had ever produced was Benedict Arnold, the villainous traitor who had turned against his country and whose name was reviled by all patriots. Every other historical figure was wise and good and just. Every day brought further progress, and extraordinary as the American past had been, the future held even more promise. Never forget how lucky you are. To be an American is to take part in the greatest human enterprise since the creation of man.