Read Online The Boy Detective by Roger Rosenblatt - Free Book Online Page B

Connecticut, on a leafy street. It came with a collie named Lady, which was great for me because our own dog had died the previous winter. On the first day there, as my parents unpacked, I took a stroll down the new street and came to a large Tudor house with a glass-walled sunroom in the back. Peering in, I saw a gleaming concert grand. The door was open, so I walked in, just like that, and I began to play “Danny Boy” and “The Blue Danube,” the two pieces I had picked out some months earlier. As I played, a blonde in her twenties, who looked like a princess in a fairy tale, entered from the main house, stood at the far end of the piano, and gently smiled. She listened to me play, gave me cookies, took me back to my parents, and told them the story of my bold visit. She called it remarkable. My parents came up with another word.
    Has anyone seen Dr. Teucher lately—he who, during that summer in Westport, took out his .22 pistol and shot kittens in his basement? One night I heard the shots. If you crossed the street to Dr. Teucher’s home, and looked past the Bilco doors into the dark, you could see the kittens lying on their sides in blood and fur. Their eyes were closed. Four, seven, maybe twelve. “Why did Dr. Teucher do that, Dad?” My father made a grim smile. “Too many kittens, I guess,” he said.
    Our second summer in Connecticut, Peter had been born. My parents rented a house in Weston, a farm community then. No neighbors in sight. My father commuted to the city and remained for two, three weeks at a time. My mother stayed with my brother, sometimes in the garden, mostly indoors. That marked the beginning of her long retreat into caring for Peter, and away from my father, and from me. A few years later, I read about a comedian, Jack Douglas, who had written a bestseller called My Brother Was an Only Child. I got the joke.
    In Weston, I rode my bike for miles every day, past hayfields, pastures, and orchards, meeting no one and looking for crime. Holmes always thought the worst crimes were committed not in the city, but in this brooding quietude of the countryside, the dead calm. Yet it’s hard to spot crime in a rural setting unless you’re Agatha Christie or Dorothy Sayers. The whorls of birds. The shadows of horses. Returning to the house one late afternoon, I saw a patrol car in the driveway, and my mother with a policeman. She was flapping her arms and, in her quiet way, shouting. My father had driven off and a copperhead had been coiled under his car. By the time the police arrived, it had disappeared. I went snake hunting in the tall dry grass.
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    I DON’T KNOW a lot about nature, but I know what I like—the feeling of impersonal companionability in the countryside, walking in the woods or fields. Trees tilting at slight angles like cowhands on a break, birds wheeling in the wind, all of nature leading a life independent from your own, yet involved with it by implication. At the age of three, in Chatham, when I would wander away from my parents’ cottage, I never felt any fear, though nature towered over me. Only comfort. At Time, I wrote a series on people who had accomplished heroic things for the environment. I visited a rain forest in Suriname that was dazzling with its red ants, howler monkeys, and bright-colored toads. Nature putting on a show. Yet I’ve always felt more at home in the less dramatic places, such as the New England woods, which is a marketplace of small activities—caterpillars and beetles going about their business as you go about yours.
    In his Confessions, Tolstoy admitted that as a small child he knew next to nothing about nature. He assumed he must have been privy to flowers and leaves, yet up to his fifth or sixth birthday, he had no memory of the natural life. This separation he calls “unnatural,” because he was aware of it, implying that to be away from nature is to yearn for it unconsciously. The