My half-year-old heart was hammering away as with a sudden hush and hurried breathing mama tiptoed after Mrs. Mullhouse up the carpeted stairs. In an anguish of anticipation I sucked my thumb. He was sleeping — Edwin was always sleeping — and as mama stepped through the door into the strange dim room I was later to know so well, the women’s hushed excitement and the sudden darkness frightened me, and I would have burst into tears had I not been fearful of incurring some strange, dim punishment. Edwin, for his part, lay sound asleep in the wooden crib by the double window. The green shades, later replaced by blinds, were drawn, though not yet luminous, and as mama bent over the crib uttering sounds of endearment, I had my first glimpse of the future author of Cartoons. He lay under a skyblue blanket with a repeated pattern of red apples and yellow pears; a fat red book with gold letters lay by his toes, which rose up under the blanket like a miniature mountain. Years later when Edwin and I were looking through the big mahogany bookcase by the stairway I came across that very book with a shock of remembrance. The gold letters spelled “David Copperfield.” I should like to report that eight-day-old Edwin was wandering precociously among those timeless pages, and perhaps he was, but a more reasonable explanation is that Mr. Mullhouse was teaching a course in the Victorians that fall (the Victorians, Edwin once said, sounded to him like one of those movies full of swordfights and slashed red curtains) and in a fit of absentmindedness had left it in the crib, and probably was searching for it distractedly somewhere downstairs at the very moment I was being introduced to his son. Edwin lay absolutely still. He looked as if he had died of old age. His chubby bare arms lay outside the blanket and were folded across his chest, the elbows by his sides and the fists together at his throat. Beneath a fringe of hair the little old face had a meditative expression. Domed over the sleeping eyes, the unlashed lids resembled the sightless white eyes of marble statues. As I watched, the little fists began to turn over, revealing handfuls of wrinkled fingers; the head rolled toward us slightly; and slowly, dreamily, the eyelids opened over large gray irises (later so deeply brown). Edwin was staring straight into my eyes. Ten years later as we sat talking late into the night, gathering material for his biography, I asked Edwin (half in jest) if he remembered our first meeting, and he replied (half in jest) that he remembered it very well indeed: “a vague sensation of someone bending too close to me.” He smiled, and I instantly moved away, and I was never able to ascertain whether or not he did in truth remember; but I record this snippet of midnight conversation in support of the very real possibility that I was Edwin’s first memory. Be that as it may, Edwin as I was saying opened his eyes and stared straight into mine. Perhaps it was the suddenness of it all, perhaps it was the strangeness of waking up in his new home, perhaps it was simply the first of his many jokes, at any rate his little wrinkled hands began to roll back and forth at the wrists, his smooth face filled with creases, and fiercely, as if he had just been born, the destined subject of these pages burst into a shriek of tears.
5
“OH,” said mama, “poor Edward.”
“Edwin,” said Mrs. Mullhouse.
“Oh yes of course how — Edwin, not Edward.”
“It’s a perfectly natural mistake, everybody makes it. You see, we wanted to give him a special name, but not a funny one of course. This way the boys can call him Ed but he won’t just be any old stupid Edward. Shhhhhh, bubbele, shhhhhh.”
“Such a cunnin’,” cooed mama. In her own way she was a clever if haphazard punster.
6
DESPITE THAT FIRST MEETING, with its unfortunate aura of ill-boding, we were soon inseparable. Edwin was like that: he resisted all change violently, but as soon as the change became part of his normal scheme of things he clung to it violently, resisting all change. We developed an intimate speechless friendship. Through the mist of years I look back upon that time as upon a green island of silence from which I set forth forever onto a tempestuous sea. In green and blue August we stared at one another through the lacquered bars of his crib. In orange and blue October we rode side by side in our carriages along Benjamin Street; a yellow leaf came down out of the sky onto Edwin’s blanket. In white and blue December I gave him a snowball, which he tried to eat. He liked his father to hold him upside down and blow on his feet. On my first birthday (February is a gray month) I gave him a piece of cake; he threw it up in the air, where I shall leave it. April showers bring May flowers. Time, as Edwin would never have said, passed.
Not that we were literally silent. Before Speech the Intruder came crashing into our private party he made quite a preliminary ruckus, pounding on the door and rattling the knob and tossing snowballs at the windows. That is to say, in the early months we had an elaborate system of gasps, purrs, chuckles, burbles, sniffs, smacks, snorts, burps, clicks, plops, clucks, yelps, puffs, gulps, slurps, squeals, ho’s, hums, buzzes, whines, chirrups, grunts, hisses, hollers, yowls, rasps, gurgles, gargles, glugs, and giggles, not to mention a vast number of hitherto unclassified sounds: gurshes, jurbles, fliffs, cloffs, whizzles, mishes, nists, wints, bibbles, chickles, plips, and chirkles, to name a few, as well as occasional norples, nufts, and snools. Edwin’s pre-speech vocabulary was impressive and I bitterly regret that I was unable to record his earliest experiments with language. I do remember a number of them, however, for from the beginning I observed him with the fond solicitude of an elder brother and the scrupulous fascination of a budding biographer. I can confidently state that the following utterances issued from the mouth of Edwin before he had attained the age of three months:
aaaaa (crying)
nnnnn (complaining)
kkkkk (giggling)
ggggg (giggling)
cheeeooo (sneezing)
hp hp hp (hiccuping)
haaaooo (yawning)
tatata (singing)
fsssss (drooling)
eeeee (screaming; singing)
b-b-b-b-b (unknown)
By six months (I was a year old and walking) Edwin had achieved more elaborate combinations:
kakooka
pshhh
dam dam dam
chfff (an early version of Jeffrey?)
keeee (accompanied by a grin and flapping hands)
kfffk
dknnnnz
shksp-p-p-p
kaloo
kalay
aaaaaeeeee (singing)
Some of his bolder adventures in the realm of sound were later suppressed by the polite requirements of civilized noise. I refer not so much to his intricate belches and exquisite winds as to his astonishing salivary achievements. How I long to convey to the adult reader his breathtaking combinations of the buzz and drool, his dribbles and drizzles, his bubbles and burbles — whole salivary sonatas enhanced by gushing crescendos and hissing fortissimi, gurgling glissandi and trickling pianissimi, streaming prestissimos, spouting arpeggios, those slurps and slops, those drips and drops, those spluttering splattering splurts of sputum and drippy splish-splashings of melodious spittle. Adult speech, Edwin used to say, is ridiculously exclusive.