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Authors: Joyce Carol Oates
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the most shameful.
A man can admit with a cheerful shrug of his shoulders to larceny, wife-beating, treason, even murder (as I am to do shortly), but trivialities concerning his honor arouse the most shame. This is because the ego's threads of radiation never quite stop, even in the most depraved of us, and we must always think, “Yes, but my essential honor wasn't touched. Yes, but my dignity wasn't touched. Yes, but… But…”
But…
It was January when we moved to Fernwood, and Nada found out at once about the schools. The public school was out, she decided, because my nervous little mind needed more stimulation. She had had an interest in the Catholic Church for a while, a fluctuating interest like all her interests, but people told her emphatically that the local Catholic school wasn't good enough for her son. (She talked in a rapid low voice about her “son,” who was me, a prodigious child never understood by his father or his teachers.) So she drove me over to Johns Behemoth one frosty morning.
Let me describe Nada on such a morning. She was dressed in her suburban style (she had two general styles, as you will see) and most fiercely and proudly was she adorned, in her simply cut dark wool suit, and two dots of silver that were earrings, and white leather gloves that looked like baby's skin, bleached, and a purse to match, and the jeweled wristwatch that Father had given her for no particular reason—no reason that I had been able to snoop out—a month before. Her shoes were made of leather, her legs were smooth and scintillating in the vivid light, covered with invisible nylon, and she wore over her suit her sporty fur coat, which was something to wear “in the country,” alternating bands of white and caramel fur, and from all this arose a faint halo of warm perfume that might have been Nada's magic radiance. A child, I did not let on that I noticed the interested gaze of men we drove past, mere gas-station attendants or sometimes village executives strolling to work or down to the train depot. I did not even let on that I noticed the looks Father gave her sometimes, sad and yearning and vulnerable, when she would hurry into a room Father was in, lookingfor something she would never find in that room—or in any room he and I were in, drooping, happy Father and I, her prodigy. Much of my child's life consisted of averting my eyes and turning away from things I was not supposed to see.
She took the Cadillac that morning. Father was at work. He had driven off that morning at seven and he was at work, in an office all his own some distance away. I will take you there eventually, but Nada is always more interesting, and this is the story (or is everything in my life only an anecdote?) of how she brought me to Johns Behemoth, saw what the challenge was, and conquered it. In the lovely yellow car she wheeled around the unpaved lanes of Fernwood Heights, which was adjacent to plain Fernwood and much more expensive. We passed stone walls and brick walls and walls of evergreens that must have hidden extraordinary homes, twisting and turning in a kind of perpetual pine forest, until we came to the wrought-iron gate and the sign
JOHNS BEHEMOTH BOYS' SCHOOL
PARKING FOR VISITORS
SPEED 15 MPH
“We're going to get you into this school, Richard,” Nada said grimly. She looked at everything and took in everything. I could feel the jolt of this place on her body, my poor mother, who was so simple in her way that all things ostentatious and expensive seemed emanations of a higher existence, which she never questioned the way Father might. She attributed this to his vulgarity.
Quietly watching them both, which was my life's work, I could see that Nada's superior mind disqualified her entirely for judgments concerning anyone who didn't compete with her on the intellectual level. She criticized scornfully and recklessly those writers she loved best, Tolstoi and Mann, embarrassed by occasional lapses of taste or power in
A man can admit with a cheerful shrug of his shoulders to larceny, wife-beating, treason, even murder (as I am to do shortly), but trivialities concerning his honor arouse the most shame. This is because the ego's threads of radiation never quite stop, even in the most depraved of us, and we must always think, “Yes, but my essential honor wasn't touched. Yes, but my dignity wasn't touched. Yes, but… But…”
But…
It was January when we moved to Fernwood, and Nada found out at once about the schools. The public school was out, she decided, because my nervous little mind needed more stimulation. She had had an interest in the Catholic Church for a while, a fluctuating interest like all her interests, but people told her emphatically that the local Catholic school wasn't good enough for her son. (She talked in a rapid low voice about her “son,” who was me, a prodigious child never understood by his father or his teachers.) So she drove me over to Johns Behemoth one frosty morning.
Let me describe Nada on such a morning. She was dressed in her suburban style (she had two general styles, as you will see) and most fiercely and proudly was she adorned, in her simply cut dark wool suit, and two dots of silver that were earrings, and white leather gloves that looked like baby's skin, bleached, and a purse to match, and the jeweled wristwatch that Father had given her for no particular reason—no reason that I had been able to snoop out—a month before. Her shoes were made of leather, her legs were smooth and scintillating in the vivid light, covered with invisible nylon, and she wore over her suit her sporty fur coat, which was something to wear “in the country,” alternating bands of white and caramel fur, and from all this arose a faint halo of warm perfume that might have been Nada's magic radiance. A child, I did not let on that I noticed the interested gaze of men we drove past, mere gas-station attendants or sometimes village executives strolling to work or down to the train depot. I did not even let on that I noticed the looks Father gave her sometimes, sad and yearning and vulnerable, when she would hurry into a room Father was in, lookingfor something she would never find in that room—or in any room he and I were in, drooping, happy Father and I, her prodigy. Much of my child's life consisted of averting my eyes and turning away from things I was not supposed to see.
She took the Cadillac that morning. Father was at work. He had driven off that morning at seven and he was at work, in an office all his own some distance away. I will take you there eventually, but Nada is always more interesting, and this is the story (or is everything in my life only an anecdote?) of how she brought me to Johns Behemoth, saw what the challenge was, and conquered it. In the lovely yellow car she wheeled around the unpaved lanes of Fernwood Heights, which was adjacent to plain Fernwood and much more expensive. We passed stone walls and brick walls and walls of evergreens that must have hidden extraordinary homes, twisting and turning in a kind of perpetual pine forest, until we came to the wrought-iron gate and the sign
JOHNS BEHEMOTH BOYS' SCHOOL
PARKING FOR VISITORS
SPEED 15 MPH
“We're going to get you into this school, Richard,” Nada said grimly. She looked at everything and took in everything. I could feel the jolt of this place on her body, my poor mother, who was so simple in her way that all things ostentatious and expensive seemed emanations of a higher existence, which she never questioned the way Father might. She attributed this to his vulgarity.
Quietly watching them both, which was my life's work, I could see that Nada's superior mind disqualified her entirely for judgments concerning anyone who didn't compete with her on the intellectual level. She criticized scornfully and recklessly those writers she loved best, Tolstoi and Mann, embarrassed by occasional lapses of taste or power in
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