“He’s an undertaker,” I said, having learned some time ago that if I said it with a steely enough voice (picked up from Channel Five reruns of Bela Lugosi films), it would shut just about anybody up, at least for a while.
Sometime in the next hour or so, Gene had a twenty-minute, hysterical crying jag and decided he wanted to go home — I don’t recall about what. I do remember thinking: This is ridiculous, I’ll never be able to put up with this next to me all summer!
I asked the counsellor if I could be assigned a bed next to someone — anyone — else. The counsellor said no.
Disappointed, I went back to my bed and was sitting on it, arranging my jeans, swimming trunks, and underwear in the wooden shelf wedged back under the sloping canvas roof, when another boy shouted: “Look out?
I dived forward onto the next bed, and rolled over to see Gene’s eight-inch hunting knife plunged through my army blanket, the two sheets and thin mattress, and heard it grate the springs. Gene, clutching the handle, stopped shaking with hysterical rage, pulled the knife free and looked about at the seven other boys in the tent, who all stared back. My blanket settled, with just the slightest wrinkle, and an inch-and-a-half slit, slightly off center.
Gene, frankly, looked as astonished as the rest of us.
Just then the counsellor (that year his name was Marty) backed up the tent steps, dragging his own trunk, and asked one of the boys to help him put it under his bed. Somebody went back to packing his shelf. Somebody else sat down on his own bed, creaking springs. Gene blinked a few times then put the knife in his top shelf, between his soap dish and his mess kit.
I left the tent, took a walk around the tent colony, watching, through the rolled-back tent flaps, the other campers unpack. Finally, I went into the creosoted bathroom shack, had diarrhea for fifteen minutes, at the end of which, with a red ball-point pen, I wrote something stupid and obscene on the wall beside something equally stupid and obscene.
In the same way I have no memory of what directly preceded our class harassment of Robert, I have no real memory of what precisely occurred just before Gene’s outburst. What had we done to him? Did I assist in it? Or do nothing to prevent it? Or did I instigate it? Conveniently, I have forgotten.
Sitting in the pine-planked stall, looking at the cracked cement flooring, I do remember thinking: If I am going to have to sleep next to this nut, I’d better make friends with him. Then I went back to my tent where Marty was asking for the choice of stories we wanted him to read us after lights-out. The vote was unanimous for Jack London.
Over the next week, occasionally I looked at the little tear in my blanket: but once the initial fear had gone, with the odd callousness of childhood, I set about making friends with Gene; there was nothing else to do.
Tuesday morning, after breakfast, Gene received in the mail, from his father, cover proofs for the two forthcoming issues of Galaxy (containing the last installment of Caves of Steel, and the first of Gladiators at Law), both covers by Emsh — Gene’s favorite sf illustrator. Perhaps a week after that, he received an advance copy of the first issue of the fantasy magazine Beyond. I borrowed it from him one afternoon and read Theodore Cogswell’s “The Wall Around the World,” which, I decided, was the best story I had ever read.
Our tent counsellor, Marty, was a graduate physics student at City College, and a science-fiction reader himself.
I asked Gene if I could lend Marty the magazine; after much debate, Gene said yes. Marty read the story, said he liked it, but that it made its point by oversimplifying things.
As we walked down the path between the girls’ bunks and an old barn building, called for some reason (there were several apocryphal stories explaining why) Brooklyn College, I asked: “Why do you say it’s oversimplified?” Porgy’s adventures on a world where magic controls one half and science the other had seemed quite the most significant construct I had encountered since slow light or the multiple calculus.
“Well,” Marty explained, as a herd of boys and girls swarmed from the ping-pong tables, out the wide doors of Brooklyn College, to troop along the road as the dinner bell, down by the dining room, donged and danged, “if you define magic as all that is not science, and science as all that is not magic — well, for one thing, you come up with a situation where, if science exists, magic must too. And we know it doesn’t. It’s much more useful to consider science a refinement of magic — that’s what it is historically. As it gets refined, there’re just fewer and fewer contradictions: It just gets more and more effective.”
And that evening, after we were all in bed, Marty, sitting back on his own bed, with a flashlight propped against his shoulder, would read us To Build a Fire, or South of the Slot, or The Shadow and the Flash.
My best friend that year at summer camp was Karen, who, though she was odd, seemed more efficient at it than Gene. She never tried to kill me; and no one ever tried to kill her.
She used to fill endless terrariums with snakes she caught in the woods. Once, when we were working together putting up screens in the camp Nature House, I interrupted her explanation of how to tell which mushrooms were and which were not Deadly Amanita, to ask her if she liked science fiction. She said no, because there weren’t any girls in it — “Or, when there are, they never do anything”—which, for all the bikinis-and-bubble-helmets, I had to admit was about true.
And Gene was unhappy at camp and went home after the first month anyway.
Back at school, Greek and Roman history were replaced by a term of medieval European history, and then a term of combined Chinese and Indian history. Our history teacher that year, a Mrs. Ethel Muckerjee, a plump, New England woman of diminutive but impressive bearing (she was one of the handful of teachers we did not call by their first name), had spent many years in India and had been the wife of the late, Indian scholar, Dan Ghopal Muckerjee, who (so went the story we told each other in hushed tones) had committed suicide some years ago when he had discovered himself victim of fatal, lingering cancer, and whose English translations of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata were, that term, our literature texts.
In class discussions, cross-legged on the vinyl floor (while, under the window seat, the radiators hissed and, occasionally, clunked), I would watch Mrs. Muckerjee, with her white hair, her gray tweeds, and her blocky-heeled shoes, lean forward in her chair and explain to the circle of us: “Now, recall the Iliad from last year. Do you see how, in the Mahabharata, the relationship of gods to men envisioned by Valmiki under his anthill is — ” and here, hands on her knees, her elbows would bend — “very different from the relation held by the blind Greek, Homer…”
That spring, the Old Vic production of Giraudoux’s Tiger at the Gates came to New York, with Michael Redgrave. The aunt of a school friend took us to the first Wednesday Matinee during our spring vacation. From the second row, I watched while a story whose plot I knew (just as I had been told that the audiences for the original Greek drama all knew the plots beforehand too) was used to say something that struck me, at the time, as completely new. The fascinating thing to me was that the inevitability of the story was part of what was being constantly discussed on stage.