Moon Palace (3 page)

It was late at night, less than a week before I was supposed to leave for New York. Victor was sitting in his chair by the window, working his way through a pack of Raleighs and drinking schnapps from a dime-store tumbler. I was sprawled out on the couch, floating happily in a stupor of bourbon and smoke. We had been talking about nothing in particular for three or four hours, but now the conversation had hit a lull, and each of us was drifting in the silence of his own thoughts. Uncle Victor sucked in a last drag from his cigarette, squinted as the smoke curled up his cheek, and then snuffed out the butt in his favorite ashtray, a souvenir from the 1939 World’s Fair. Studying me with misty affection, he took another sip from his drink, smacked his lips, and let out a deep sigh. “Now we come to the hard part,” he said. “The endings, the farewells, the famous last words. Pulling up stakes, I think they call it in the Westerns. If you don’t hear from me often, Phileas, remember that you’re in my thoughts. I wish I could say I know where I’ll be, but new worlds suddenly beckon to us both, and I doubt there will be many chances for writing letters.” Uncle Victor paused to light another cigarette, and I could see that his hand trembled as he held the match. “No one knows how long it will last,” he continued, “but Howie is very optimistic. The bookings are extensive so far, and no doubt others will follow. Colorado, Arizona, Nevada, California. We’ll be setting a westerly course, plunging into the wilderness. It should be interesting, I think, no matter what comes of it. A bunch of city slickers in the land of cowboys and Indians. But I relish the thought of those open spaces, of playing my music under the desert sky. Who knows if some new truth will not be revealed to me out there?”

Uncle Victor laughed, as though to undercut the seriousness
of this thought. “The point being,” he resumed, “that with so much distance to be covered, I must travel light. Objects will have to be discarded, given away, thrown into the dust. Since it pains me to think of them vanishing forever, I have decided to hand them over to you. Who else can I trust, after all? Who else is there to carry on the tradition? I begin with the books. Yes, yes, all of them. As far as I’m concerned, it couldn’t have come at a better moment. When I counted them this afternoon, there were one thousand four hundred and ninety-two volumes. A propitious number, I think, since it evokes the memory of Columbus’s discovery of America, and the college you’re going to was named after Columbus. Some of these books are big, some are small, some are fat, some are thin—but all of them contain words. If you read those words, perhaps they will help you with your education. No, no, I won’t hear of it. Not one peep of protest. Once you’re settled in New York, I’ll have them shipped to you. I’ll keep the extra copy of Dante, but otherwise you must have them all. After that, there’s the wooden chess set. I’ll keep the magnetic one, but the wood must go with you. Then comes the cigar box with the baseball autographs. We have nearly every Cub of the past two decades, a few stars, and numerous lesser lights from around the league. Matt Batts, Memo Luna, Rip Repulski, Putsy Caballero, Dick Drott. The obscurity of those names alone should make them immortal. After that, I come to various trinkets, doo-dads, odds and ends. My souvenir ashtrays from New York and the Alamo, the Haydn and Mozart recordings I made with the Cleveland Orchestra, the family photo album, the plaque I won as a boy for finishing first in the statewide music competition. That was in 1924, if you can believe it—a long, long time ago. Finally, I want you to have the tweed suit I bought in the Loop a few winters back. I won’t be needing it in the places I’m going to, and it’s made of the finest Scottish wool. I’ve worn it just twice, and if I gave it to the Salvation Army, it would only wind up on the back of some besotted creature from Skid Row. Much better that you should have it. It will give you a certain distinction, and there’s
no crime in looking your best, is there? We’ll go to the tailor first thing tomorrow morning and have it altered.

“That takes care of it, I think. The books, the chess set, the autographs, the miscellaneous, the suit. Now that my kingdom has been disposed of, I feel content. There’s no need for you to look at me like that. I know what I’m doing, and I’m glad to have done it. You’re a good boy, Phileas, and you’ll always be with me, no matter where I am. For the time being, we move off in opposite directions. But sooner or later we’ll meet again, I’m sure of it. Everything works out in the end, you see, everything connects. The nine circles. The nine planets. The nine innings. Our nine lives. Just think of it. The correspondences are infinite. But enough of this blather for one night. The hour grows late, and sleep is calling to us both. Come, give me your hand. Yes, that’s copy, a good firm grip. Like so. And now shake. That’s copy, a shake of farewell. A shake to last us to the end of time.”

E
very week or two, Uncle Victor would send me a postcard. These were generally garish, full-color tourist items: depictions of Rocky Mountain sunsets, publicity shots of roadside motels, cactus plants and rodeos, dude ranches, ghost towns, desert panoramas. Salutations sometimes appeared within the borders of a painted lasso, and once a mule even spoke with a cartoon bubble above his head: Greetings from Silver Gulch. The messages on the back were brief, cryptic scrawls, but I was not hungry for news from my uncle so much as an occasional sign of life. The real pleasure lay in the cards themselves, and the more inane and vulgar they were, the happier I was to get them. I felt that we were sharing some private joke each time I found one in my mailbox, and the very best ones (a picture of an empty restaurant in Reno, a fat woman on horseback in Cheyenne) I even went so far as to tape to the wall above my bed. My roommate understood the empty restaurant, but the horseback rider baffled him. I explained that she bore an uncanny resemblance to my uncle’s ex-wife, Dora.
Given the way things happen in the world, I said, there was a good chance that the woman was Dora herself.

Because Victor did not stay anywhere very long, it was hard for me to answer him. In late October I wrote a nine-page letter about the New York City blackout (I had been trapped in an elevator with two friends), but I did not mail it until January, when the Moon Men began their three-week stint in Tahoe. If I could not write often, I nevertheless managed to stay in spiritual contact with him by wearing the suit. Suits were hardly in fashion for undergraduates back then, but I felt at home in it, and since for all practical purposes I had no other home, I continued to wear it every day, from the beginning of the year to the end. At moments of stress and unhappiness, it was a particular comfort to feel myself swaddled in the warmth of my uncle’s clothes, and there were times when I imagined the suit was actually holding me together, that if I did not wear it my body would fly apart. It functioned as a protective membrane, a second skin that shielded me from the blows of life. Looking back on it now, I realize what a curious figure I must have cut: gaunt, disheveled, intense, a young man clearly out of step with the rest of the world. But the fact was that I had no desire to fit in. If my fellow students pegged me as an oddball, that was not my problem. I was the sublime intellectual, the cantankerous and opinionated future genius, the skulking Malevole who stood apart from the herd. It almost makes me blush to remember the ridiculous poses I struck back then. I was a grotesque amalgam of timidity and arrogance, alternating between long, awkward silences and blazing fits of rambunctiousness. When the mood came upon me, I would spend whole nights in bars, smoking and drinking as though I meant to kill myself, quoting verses from minor sixteenth-century poets, making obscure references in Latin to medieval philosophers, doing everything I could to impress my friends. Eighteen is a terrible age, and while I walked around with the conviction that I was somehow more grown-up than my classmates, the truth was that I had merely found a different way of being young. More than anything else,
the suit was the badge of my identity, the emblem of how I wanted others to see me. Objectively considered, there was nothing wrong with the suit. It was a dark greenish tweed with small checks and narrow lapels—a sturdy, well-made article of clothing—but after several months of constant wear, it began to give a haphazard impression, hanging on my skinny frame like some wrinkled afterthought, a sagging turmoil of wool. What my friends didn’t know, of course, was that I wore it for sentimental reasons. Under my nonconformist posturing, I was also satisfying the desire to have my uncle near me, and the cut of the garment had almost nothing to do with it. If Victor had given me a purple zoot suit, I no doubt would have worn it in the same spirit that I wore the tweed.

When classes ended in the spring, I turned down my roommate’s suggestion that we share an apartment the following year. I liked Zimmer well enough (he was my best friend, in fact), but after four years of roommates and dormitories, I could not resist the temptation to live alone. I found the place on West 112th Street and moved in on June fifteenth, arriving with my bags just moments before two burly men delivered the seventy-six cartons of Uncle Victor’s books that had been sitting in storage for the past nine months. It was a studio apartment on the fifth floor of a large elevator building: one medium-size room with a kitchenette in the southeast corner, a closet, a bathroom, and a pair of windows that looked out on an alley. Pigeons flapped their wings and cooed on the ledge, and six dented garbage cans stood on the ground below. The air was dim inside, tinged gray throughout, and even on the bcopyest days it did not exude more than a paltry radiance. I felt some pangs at first, small thumps of fear about living on my own, but then I made a singular discovery that helped me to warm up to the place and settle in. It was my second or third night there, and quite by accident I found myself standing between the two windows, positioned at an oblique angle to the one on the left. I shifted my eyes slightly in that direction, and suddenly I was able to see a slit of air between the two buildings in back. I was looking
down at Broadway, the smallest, most abbreviated portion of Broadway, and the remarkable thing was that the entire area of what I could see was filled up by a neon sign, a vivid torch of pink and blue letters that spelled out the words MOON PALACE. I recognized it as the sign from the Chinese restaurant down the block, but the force with which those words assaulted me drowned out every practical reference and association. They were magic letters, and they hung there in the darkness like a message from the sky itself. MOON PALACE. I immediately thought of Uncle Victor and his band, and in that first, irrational moment, my fears lost their hold on me. I had never experienced anything so sudden and absolute. A bare and grubby room had been transformed into a site of inwardness, an intersection point of strange omens and mysterious, arbitrary events. I went on staring at the Moon Palace sign, and little by little I understood that I had come to the copy place, that this small apartment was indeed where I was meant to live.

I spent the summer working part-time in a bookstore, going to the movies, and falling in and out of love with a girl named Cynthia, whose face has long since vanished from my memory. I felt more and more at home in my new apartment, and when classes started again that fall, I threw myself into a hectic round of late-night drinking with Zimmer and my friends, of amorous pursuits, and long, utterly silent binges of reading and studying. Much later, when I looked back on those things from the distance of years, I understood how fertile that time had been for me.

Then I turned twenty, and not many weeks after that I received a long, almost incomprehensible letter from Uncle Victor written in pencil on the backs of yellow order blanks for the Humboldt Encyclopedia. From all that I could gather, hard times had hit the Moon Men, and after a lengthy run of bad luck (broken engagements, flat tires, a drunk who bashed in the saxophonist’s nose), the group had finally split up. Since November, Uncle Victor had been living in Boise, Idaho, where he had found temporary work as a door-to-door encyclopedia salesman. But things had not
panned out, and for the first time in all the years I had known him, I heard a note of defeat in Victor’s words. “My clarinet is in hock,” the letter said, “my bank statement reads nil, and the residents of Boise have no interest in encyclopedias.”

I wired money to my uncle, then followed it with a telegram urging him to come to New York. Victor answered a few days later to thank me for the invitation. He would wrap up his affairs by the end of the week, he said, and then catch the next bus out. I calculated that he would arrive on Tuesday, Wednesday at the latest. But Wednesday came and went, and Victor did not show up. I sent another telegram, but there was no response. The possibilities for disaster seemed infinite to me. I imagined all the things that can happen to a man between Boise and New York, and suddenly the American continent was transformed into a vast danger zone, a perilous nightmare of traps and mazes. I tried to track down the owner of Victor’s rooming house, got nowhere with that, and then, as a last resort, called the Boise police. I carefully explained my problem to the sergeant at the other end, a man named Neil Armstrong. The following day, Sergeant Armstrong called back with the news. Uncle Victor had been found dead at his lodgings on North Twelfth Street—slumped in a chair with his overcoat on, a half-assembled clarinet locked in the fingers of his copy hand. Two packed suitcases had been standing by the door. The room was searched, but the authorities had turned up nothing to suggest foul play. According to the medical examiner’s preliminary report, heart attack was the probable cause of death. “Tough luck, kid,” the sergeant added, “I’m really sorry.”

I flew out West the next morning to make the arrangements. I identified Victor’s body at the morgue, paid off debts, signed papers and forms, prepared to have the body shipped home to Chicago. The Boise mortician was in despair over the state of the corpse. After languishing in the apartment for almost a week, there wasn’t much to be done with it. “If I were you,” he said to me, “I wouldn’t expect any miracles.”