exclusive province of adults. I felt like someone who had solved a hard problem and now could imagine relaxing. I was sleepy and closed my eyes.
It was not, as it happened, polio, but a kind of meningitis that did no lasting damage but kept me in the hospital three months. I came home to two separate houses. Since then I have often wondered why my parents—who were always so careful of me—failed to consider the effect on me of a homecoming like that. Why couldn’t they have waited? But I think that they must have considered waiting and found that they had no choice.
My father and I were never so close again. For a long while I was angry at him, and somewhere in that time stopped wanting to please him and tell him interesting things, including something I remembered, a thought I had but couldn’t say when he came to pick me up at the museum.
I remember very clearly lying on a cot in a room with adults gathered around. I looked up and saw my father’s face, all wavy and distorted and extraordinarily beautiful, and I wanted to tell him something but couldn’t speak, wanted to say it so badly that I can remember it now.
What I wanted to say was this: that he had been wrong about El Greco, that if something was straight and you saw it curved, you would actually paint it straight; your hand would correct what your eye had seen wrong, so it finally came out right. Then the objects in your painting would appear to you just as everything always did—distorted, buckled, and curved. But anyone else who looked at it would see what you never saw—a perfect likeness of the world, the world as it really was.
AMATEUR VOODOO
P HILIP ASKS FOR PAPER, crayons, and tape, and papers his bedroom walls with drawings of cats. He’s trying to work magic, to bring his cat back home. It’s been four days since he and his parents returned from Cape Cod to find Geronimo gone. Philip and Frank and Jenny took turns calling the cat, and then, when it got dark, Philip sat on the front steps with a flashlight and an open cat-food can.
“Amateur voodoo,” says Frank. Basically Frank approves; some part of him even thinks it might work. In that way he and Philip are different from Jenny, who, from the start, assumed the cat was gone for good.
Philip hasn’t mentioned Geronimo since that first night, and even when he takes Jenny upstairs to see his room, she senses that he still doesn’t want to talk about it. He has used maybe fifty sheets from the reams of Xerox paper they buy him. Every picture is different. Cat close-ups and long shots, cats that are all whiskers and others doing things like riding bikes. Later, Frank says, “He’s got his room done like Lourdes.” But Jenny has had another kind of flash: those little Mexican statues of skeletons playing volleyball, riding bikes, doing just what Philip’s cats are, and with similar crazy smiles.
Both of them think this is basically good, this evidence in Philip of loyalty and love. Jenny just wonders: good for whom? On their vacation, Philip, who is six, fell in love with a fifteen-year-old girl. Cheryl’s parents were renting the house next door; there were no other kids around. She and Philip would go to the beach. Jenny and Frank weren’t surprised—Philip is better company than most adults. Free babysitting, they thought. But then a sixteen-year-old boy showed up and Cheryl went off with him. Philip said he was sleepy and wouldn’t come out of his room, and they realized that it had been—in every way but one, they hoped—just like an adult love. It shadowed everything for a day or so, until Philip cheered up. Things must be in proportion if Philip is working harder to get back his cat than he did to get back Cheryl, though maybe it just seems to him more possible.
Already this cat has had a fairly complicated history. Philip got him in May, as a kitten. A friend found him on her lawn; a passing car must have left him there. Well, not a friend, exactly; a woman named Ada
It was not, as it happened, polio, but a kind of meningitis that did no lasting damage but kept me in the hospital three months. I came home to two separate houses. Since then I have often wondered why my parents—who were always so careful of me—failed to consider the effect on me of a homecoming like that. Why couldn’t they have waited? But I think that they must have considered waiting and found that they had no choice.
My father and I were never so close again. For a long while I was angry at him, and somewhere in that time stopped wanting to please him and tell him interesting things, including something I remembered, a thought I had but couldn’t say when he came to pick me up at the museum.
I remember very clearly lying on a cot in a room with adults gathered around. I looked up and saw my father’s face, all wavy and distorted and extraordinarily beautiful, and I wanted to tell him something but couldn’t speak, wanted to say it so badly that I can remember it now.
What I wanted to say was this: that he had been wrong about El Greco, that if something was straight and you saw it curved, you would actually paint it straight; your hand would correct what your eye had seen wrong, so it finally came out right. Then the objects in your painting would appear to you just as everything always did—distorted, buckled, and curved. But anyone else who looked at it would see what you never saw—a perfect likeness of the world, the world as it really was.
AMATEUR VOODOO
P HILIP ASKS FOR PAPER, crayons, and tape, and papers his bedroom walls with drawings of cats. He’s trying to work magic, to bring his cat back home. It’s been four days since he and his parents returned from Cape Cod to find Geronimo gone. Philip and Frank and Jenny took turns calling the cat, and then, when it got dark, Philip sat on the front steps with a flashlight and an open cat-food can.
“Amateur voodoo,” says Frank. Basically Frank approves; some part of him even thinks it might work. In that way he and Philip are different from Jenny, who, from the start, assumed the cat was gone for good.
Philip hasn’t mentioned Geronimo since that first night, and even when he takes Jenny upstairs to see his room, she senses that he still doesn’t want to talk about it. He has used maybe fifty sheets from the reams of Xerox paper they buy him. Every picture is different. Cat close-ups and long shots, cats that are all whiskers and others doing things like riding bikes. Later, Frank says, “He’s got his room done like Lourdes.” But Jenny has had another kind of flash: those little Mexican statues of skeletons playing volleyball, riding bikes, doing just what Philip’s cats are, and with similar crazy smiles.
Both of them think this is basically good, this evidence in Philip of loyalty and love. Jenny just wonders: good for whom? On their vacation, Philip, who is six, fell in love with a fifteen-year-old girl. Cheryl’s parents were renting the house next door; there were no other kids around. She and Philip would go to the beach. Jenny and Frank weren’t surprised—Philip is better company than most adults. Free babysitting, they thought. But then a sixteen-year-old boy showed up and Cheryl went off with him. Philip said he was sleepy and wouldn’t come out of his room, and they realized that it had been—in every way but one, they hoped—just like an adult love. It shadowed everything for a day or so, until Philip cheered up. Things must be in proportion if Philip is working harder to get back his cat than he did to get back Cheryl, though maybe it just seems to him more possible.
Already this cat has had a fairly complicated history. Philip got him in May, as a kitten. A friend found him on her lawn; a passing car must have left him there. Well, not a friend, exactly; a woman named Ada
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