, and then a rush of exaltation: now everything begins.
A FIRST TIME FOR EVERYTHING
Sunday, June 16, 1968
Henry: The first time was magical. How could I have known what it meant? It
was my fifth birthday, and we went to the Field Museum of Natural History. I
don't think I had ever been to the Field Museum before. My parents had been
telling me all week about the wonders to be seen there, the stuffed elephants in
the great hall, the dinosaur skeletons, the caveman dioramas. Mom had just
gotten back from Sydney, and she had brought me an immense, surpassingly
blue butterfly, Papilio ulysses, mounted in a frame filled with cotton. I would hold
it close to my face, so close I couldn't see anything but that blue. It would fill me
with a feeling, a feeling I later tried to duplicate with alcohol and finally found
again with Clare, a feeling of unity, oblivion, mindlessness in the best sense of
the word. My parents described the cases and cases of butterflies, hummingbirds,
beetles. I was so excited that I woke up before dawn. I put on my gym shoes and
took my Papilio ulysses and went into the backyard and down the steps to the river
in my pajamas. I sat on the landing and hatched the light come up. A family of
ducks came swimming by, and a raccoon appeared on the landing across the
river and looked at me curiously before washing its breakfast and eating it. I may
have fallen asleep. I heard Mom calling and I ran back up the stairs, which were
slippery with dew, careful not to drop the butterfly. She was annoyed with me
for going down to the landing by myself, but she didn't make a big deal about it,
it being my birthday and all.
Neither of them were working that night, so they took their time getting
dressed and out the door. I was ready long before either of them. I sat on their
bed and pretended to read a score. This was around the time my musician
parents recognized that their one and only offspring was not musically gifted. It
wasn't that I wasn't trying; I just could not hear whatever it was they heard in a
piece of music. I enjoyed music, but I could hardly carry a tune. And though I
could read a newspaper when I was four, scores were only pretty black
squiggles. But my parents were still hoping I might have some hidden musical
aptitude, so when I picked up the score Mom sat down next to me and tried to
help me with it. Pretty soon Mom was singing and I was chiming in with horrible
yowling noises and snapping my fingers and we were giggling and she was
tickling me. Dad came out of the bathroom with a towel around his waist and
joined in and for a few glorious minutes they were singing together and Dad
picked me up and they were dancing around the bedroom with me pressed
between them. Then the phone rang, and the scene dissolved. Mom went to
answer it, and Dad set me on the bed and got dressed.
Finally, they were ready. My mom wore a red sleeveless dress and sandals;
she had painted her toenails and fingernails so they matched her dress. Dad was
resplendent in dark blue pants and a white short-sleeved shirt, providing a quiet
background for Mom's flamboyance. We all piled into the car. As always, I had
the whole backseat to myself, so I lay down and watched the tall buildings along
Lake Shore Drive flicking past the window.
"Sit up, Henry" said Mom. "We're here."
I sat up and looked at the museum. I had spent my childhood thus far being
carted around the capital cities of Europe, so the Field Museum satisfied my idea
of "Museum," but its domed stone facade was nothing exceptional. Because it
was Sunday, we had a little trouble finding parking, but eventually we parked
and walked along the lake, past boats and statues and other excited children. We
passed between the heavy columns and into the museum.
And then I was a boy enchanted.
Here all of nature was captured, labeled, arranged according to a logic that
seemed as timeless as if ordered by God, perhaps a God who had mislaid the
original paperwork on the Creation and had requested the Field Museum staff to
help Him out and keep track of it all. For my five-year-old self, who could derive
rapture from a single butterfly, to walk through the Field Museum was to walk
through Eden and see all that passed there.
We saw so much that day: the butterflies, to be sure, cases and cases of them,
from Brazil, from Madagascar, even a brother of my blue butterfly from Down
Under. The museum was dark, cold, and old, and this heightened the sense of
suspension, of time and death brought to a halt inside its walls. We saw crystals
and cougars, muskrats and mummies, fossils and more fossils. We ate our picnic
lunch on the lawn of the museum, and then plunged in again for birds and
alligators and Neanderthals. Toward the end I was so tired I could hardly stand,
but I couldn't bear to leave. The guards came and gently herded us all to the
doors; I struggled not to cry, but began to anyway, out of exhaustion and desire.
Dad picked me up, and we walked back to the car. I fell asleep in the backseat,
and when I awoke We were home, and it was time for dinner.
We ate downstairs in Mr. and Mrs. Kim's apartment. They were our landlords.
Mr. Kim was a gruff, compact man who seemed to like me but never said much,
and Mrs. Kim (Kimy, my nickname for her) was my buddy, my crazy Korean
card-playing babysitter. I spent most of my waking hours with Kimy. My mom
was never much of a cook, and Kimy could produce anything from a soufflé to bi
him bop with panache. Tonight, for my birthday, she had made pizza and
chocolate cake.
We ate. Everyone sang Happy Birthday and I blew out the candles. I don't
remember what I wished for. I was allowed to stay up later than usual, because I
was still excited by all the things we'd seen, and because I had slept so late in the
afternoon. I sat on the back porch in my pajamas with Mom and Dad and Mrs.
and Mr. Kim, drinking lemonade and watching the blueness of the evening sky,
listening to the cicadas and the TV noises from other apartments. Eventually Dad
said, "Bedtime, Henry." I brushed my teeth and said prayers and got into bed. I
was exhausted but wide awake. Dad read to me for a while, and then, seeing that
I still couldn't sleep, he and Mom turned out the lights, propped open my
bedroom door, and went into the living room. The deal was: they would play for
me as long as I wanted, but I had to stay in bed to listen. So Mom sat at the piano,
and Dad got out his violin, and they played and sang for a long time. Lullabies,
lieder, nocturnes; sleepy music to soothe the savage boy in the bedroom. Finally
Mom came in to see if I was asleep. I must have looked small and wary in my
little bed, a nocturnal animal in pajamas.
"Oh, baby. Still awake?"
I nodded.
"Dad and I are going to bed. Are you okay?"
I said Yes and she gave me a hug. "It was pretty exciting today at the
museum, huh?"
"Can we go back tomorrow?"
"Not tomorrow, but we'll go back real soon, okay?" Okay.
"G'night." She left the door open and flipped off the hall light. "Sleep tight.
Don't let the bedbugs bite."
I could hear little noises, water running, toilet flushing. Then all was quiet. I
got out of bed and knelt in front of my window. I could see lights in the house
next door, and somewhere a car drove by with its radio blaring. I stayed there for
a while, trying to feel sleepy, and then I stood up and everything changed.
Saturday, January 2, 1988, 4:03 a.m. /Sunday, June 16, 1968, 10:46 p.m.
(Henry is 24, and 5)
Henry: It's 4:03 a.m. on a supremely cold January morning and I'm just getting
home. I've been out dancing and I'm only half drunk but utterly exhausted. As I
fumble with my keys in the bright foyer I fall to my knees, dizzy and nauseated,
and then I am in the dark, vomiting on a tile floor. I raise my head and see a red
illuminated exit sign and as my eyes adjust I see tigers, cavemen with long
spears, cavewomen wearing strategically modest skins, wolfish dogs. My heart is
racing and for a long liquor-addled moment I think Holy shit, I've gone all the way
back to the Stone Age until I realize that exit signs tend to congregate in the
twentieth century. I get up, shaking, and venture toward the doorway, tile icy
under my bare feet, gooseflesh and all my hairs standing up. It's absolutely
silent. The air is clammy with air conditioning. I reach the entrance and look into
the next room. It's full of glass cases; the white streetlight glow through the high
windows shows me thousands of beetles. I'm in the Field Museum, praise the
Lord. I stand still and breathe deeply, trying to clear my head. Something about
this rings a bell in my fettered brain and I try to dredge it up. I'm supposed to do
something. Yes. My fifth birthday... someone was there, and I'm about to be that
someone...I need clothes. Yes. Indeed.
I sprint through beetlemania into the long hallway that bisects the second
floor, down the west staircase to the first floor, grateful to be in the
pre-motion-detector era. The great elephants loom menacingly over me in the
moonlight and I wave to them on my way to the little gift shop to the right of the
main entrance. I circle the wares and find a few promising items: an ornamental
letter opener, a metal bookmark with the Field's insignia, and two T-shirts that
feature dinosaurs. The locks on the cases are a joke; I pop them with a bobby pin
I find next to the cash register, and help myself. Okay. Back up the stairs, to the
third floor. This is the Field's "attic," where the labs are; the staff have their
offices up here. I scan the names on the doors, but none of them suggests
anything to me; finally I select at random and slide my bookmark along the lock
until the catch pushes back and I'm in.
The occupant of this office is one V. M. Williamson, and he's a very untidy
guy. The room is dense with papers, and coffee cups and cigarettes overflow
f