Steven Millhauser - Edwin Mullhouse - The Life and Death of an American Writer 1943-1954

As we passed the abruptly ending sidewalks and entered the land of vacant lots, Mrs. Mullhouse began to shout Edwin’s name. It was a serious matter, this Beech Street escapade, for Edwin was strictly forbidden to cross Robin Hill Road by himself. But he knew of the slope and stream, for we had walked there a number of times in the company of Mr. Mullhouse and his camera, and in fact a photograph already existed that showed Edwin standing by the stream in his blue workman’s overalls with the high front and the shoulder straps. Mrs. Mullhouse must have known as well as I that Edwin was beyond the slope, for even as she called his name and looked anxiously about she pushed Karen swiftly forward over the bumpy tar. Just beyond the posts she was forced to stop with the stroller, and I hurried up alone. I must have been infected by Mrs. Mullhouse’s vague fear, for a picture flashed in my mind of Edwin lying on his back under the clear brown water, his eyes staring sightlessly, his hair streaming silkily, his hands bobbing limply on the troubled surface of the water. Within seconds I had scrambled to the top. Standing in the shade of a spreading oak I saw an invisible breeze making a dark line in the tall yellow grass. Directly below, some ten feet away, Edwin stood with his back to me on the near bank of the stream, staring out across the field. He stood with his hands in the pockets of his wide brown shorts, held up by crossed suspenders; his shoulders seemed very narrow in a tight t-shirt I had never seen before, striped yellow and white. Under those billowing shorts his legs looked pale and thin; his knees touched, and between his narrow thighs was a space shaped like the dictionary illustration of a double-convex lens, through which the bubbling brown water was visible. For a few seconds I stood silently watching him as he stood motionless against a background of field and sky. Behind me Mrs. Mullhouse was unaccountably still; and suddenly as I watched I was filled with the sense of his remoteness, it was as if I did not know him at all and had never known him, it was as if he were as impenetrable to my knowledge as the hard tree shading me and pressing into me with its ridges of bark, it was as if, standing there with his back to me, he were as forever unseeable as a transparent negative, which when turned around does not show the other side but the same side reversed; and I wanted to run down to him and spin him around and make sure he was there; a passing fancy; and the sun burning in the field and the empty blue sky burning over me seemed evil puzzles I would never solve; and who knows what would have happened if a pebble dislodged by my foot had not begun to roll bumpily down toward him, jumping like a crazed insect, until it hit him in the heel, and without turning his body, but only his head, he looked slowly over his shoulder with a pale frown. It was not Edwin.

HIS NAME WAS EDWARD PENN. He was seven years old. He lived in a world of make-believe so intricate and absolute that his occasional eruptions into the world of grass and sky had for him all the elements of a fantastic voyage, as if he were the March Hare or Mad Hatter emerging from the rabbit hole and coming upon a little girl fast asleep on the bank with her head in her sister’s lap. He dwelt in a heated cellar beyond the bakery. He suffered from an obscure nervous ailment that was just serious enough to prevent him from attending school but not quite serious enough to prevent him from doing precisely as he pleased. Edwin believed that Penn had invented his disease in order to achieve complete spiritual freedom but I believe that his disease was the real physical expression of an implacable spiritual need. I believe that Penn did not survive the decade but Edwin believed that Penn would continue to exist indefinitely at the unchanging age of seven. Edwin, I should add, had not crossed Robin Hill Road at all that day — for he was always an obedient son — but had simply strayed into the vacant lot on the other side of his backyard hedge, and in fact had seen us crossing Robin Hill Road and had actually called out to us, if you can believe him. His resemblance to Penn was striking only from behind. For if Edwin’s thinness was a matter of legs and arms and neck, while his features retained the signs of an early plumpness, Penn’s features followed his body in its effort to achieve two dimensions. Penn’s nose in profile came to such a sharp point that it seemed capable of puncturing a balloon; his nostrils were so narrow that he seemed barely able to breathe. Each of his eyebrows resembled the mark over the o given in the dictionary for the pronunciation of horn or north. His little sharp ears, his thin sharp fingers, and his thin sharp mouth with its little sharp teeth, combined to give him a distinct creaturely air, though he lacked the squirrel’s sharp quick movements and indeed assumed an air of languor and aloofness, standing with his hands in his pockets and his head tilted to one side as he looked out at you from behind half-closed eyes. Was he really a friend? I think he appreciated Edwin’s eager and delicate sympathy for his world, but I suspect that he was incapable of true friendship, for I suspect that he was incapable of sustaining a belief in the reality of Edwins and Jeffreys and other such creatures. As for Edwin, he remarked once that among the three contemporaries who had exercised an influence on his life, only Edward Penn had left a lasting mark, though he couldn’t say what that mark was and in fact barely remembered Penn. “And the other two?” I asked with a smile. He replied instantly: “Rose Dorn and Arnold Hasselstrom.” There was a brief embarrassed silence. “Oh,” he said with a sudden blush, “and you too, Jeffrey.” And raising a hand he laid it gently on my shoulder. “Mathematics,” I answered harshly, “was never your strong point, Edwin.” But he looked at me in bewilderment, for as I have had occasion to remark, Edwin was never one to understand other people’s jokes.

How well I remember our first visit to that heated cellar. Mrs. Mullhouse had to accompany us, for Penn lived too far away for us to visit him by ourselves, and during our stay she remained upstairs in the living room with Mr. and Mrs. Penn, a frail couple with four sad eyes. “This way,” said Mr. Penn with a sigh and a shake of his head, opening a door in the kitchen and reaching inside to click on a dim yellow light. “Watch your step,” said Mrs. Penn with a doleful look. Carefully we began our slow way down the dimly illuminated wooden steps, holding onto a loose and splintery rail as the steps creaked under us. As we descended there rose to our nostrils a damp, sour odor that I was destined to come upon three years later on the day I entered the third grade. It was the first time I had sat at a desk; and when I opened the carved and ink-stained top I was greeted by a damp, sour odor that suddenly cast me back to the cellar of Edward Penn, which now as I write seems mixed with my old desk and its nightmare freight of pencil shavings, a black penpoint, a chewed lollipop stick, a scrap of sticky cellophane. At the dark bottom of the stairs we turned to the right and walked along a narrow passageway past looming barrels ringed with rusty hoops. Turning once more to the right we entered a wider and brighter space, and by the late afternoon light of two high oblong windows we made our way toward the far wall past piles of damp newspapers tied with string, olive-green trunks with rusty clasps, empty paint-cans stained with red drippings, a pair of dusty maroon boxing gloves beside a bright yellow Joe Palooka punching dummy, pencil shavings, a black penpoint, a chewed lollipop stick, a scrap of sticky cellophane. Turning to the right a third time we saw before us a vast faded-blue curtain rising from the dusty floor to a rod a few feet below the high ceiling. The curtain extended from the cement wall on the left to a wooden partition on the right, over which a network of nickel-colored pipes protruded. We stopped, uncertain how to proceed. “Perhaps we should go the other way,” I suggested, but at that moment we heard bedspring sounds behind the curtain, and then a small portion of the cloth began to squirm, and finally a small pale hand appeared at the invisible division of the curtains; and sweeping aside the cloth with a princely gesture, Edward Penn stepped out and said: “Hello. Mother never listens to me. I told her to stamp when you came.” And stepping aside he motioned us into his den.