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

Edwin’s reading at school was supplemented by his reading at home. He went through all his books, searching for familiar words and trying to solve new ones. The word “bone,” which we learned in October, immediately gave him the key to “lonely” in The Lonely Island, though “is” threw him into confusion, for he could not understand why “island” was not “is-land.” Indeed the relation between spelling and sound perplexed him endlessly; he never forgave the Inventor of Words for “do” and “go.” He began to read aloud to Karen from his books, omitting and inventing as the need arose. Strange words that he could not pronounce tormented him; sometimes he would throw the book down and sulk sourly, as if waiting for the offending page to apologize.

Every Saturday Dr. Mullhouse drove Edwin, Karen, and me to the library, where for an hour we pored over tall thin books filled with bright colors and large letters, many of which formed words and even sentences that Edwin could read. Nearby, in low brown bookcases, smaller and fatter books stood in tight rows that reminded me of the crayons in Edwin’s stand-up box: blue violet, blue green, green yellow, yellow green, raw umber, burnt sienna, Indian red, maroon. The older you got, Edwin knew, the smaller the letters and the fewer the pictures: the books in the low brown bookcases had only an occasional black-and-white picture at the top of a page, and his father’s books had no pictures at all. By the end of the first grade, when Edwin began to read books that contained whole pages without pictures, he was careful to choose for Karen books with very few words and many large pictures, as suited her age. But sometimes he read his own books to her as well, and sometimes he read her books secretly to himself.

As the schoolyear advanced, Edwin noticed that words were springing up all around him. Words grew all over the breakfast table — on cereal boxes, on jars of vitamins, on bottles of Saccharine. He found dozens of words on the way to school: BENJAMIN ST., JORDAN AVE., FOR SALE, STOP, VINCENT CAPOBIANCO, BUZZY LOVES SUE, OUR HOLY MOTHER OF CHRIST, OLDSMOBILE, MOBILOIL, and of course Edwin’s favorite, which made him think of nincompoops and polio: SLOW CHILDREN. There were words on his puzzle boxes, words on his Viewmaster slides, words on his cap pistols, words on his paintboxes, words on his coloring books, words on his pink rubber ball, words on his tennis ball, words on his box of checkers, words on his lightbulb, words on his light switch, words on his pillowcase. On a single penny, read by Dr. Mullhouse, were the words LIBERTY, IN GOD WE TRUST, ONE CENT, UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, and E PLURIBUS UNUM, which even Mrs. Mullhouse didn’t understand. On the paper sheath of a single crayon were the words COPPER, BINNEY & SMITH INC., NEW YORK, MADE IN U.S.A. There were words in the kitchen cabinets, words in the medicine chest, words in the closets, words in all the drawers. They grew on pencils, on lamps, on clocks, on paper bags, on cardboard boxes, on carpet sweepers, on the brass prongs of wall plugs, on the bottoms of plates, on the backs of spoons. They grew on his sneakers, in his underpants, on the inside of his shirt behind his neck. They grew even in the yard: on the white swing, on the garbage-can covers, on the oil inlet sticking up out of the frontyard grass; and one spring day he looked up to see an airplane writing words in the sky. And because, as the world passed from winter to spring, Edwin passed from the primer to the first reader, it was as if the very season were a budding and blossoming of words.

SUMMERS, Edwin and I played in lawn water and real water. Lawn water was the tall fan of the sprinkler, sweeping in a vast lazy semicircle over sparkling grass in the Mullhouse back yard. Edwin liked to wait for the water to reach the lowest point of its arc. Then taking up a position on the other side of the yellow sprinkler he would watch the water, like the dripping wing of some enormous bird, rise slowly from the polished grass, weaving rainbows where the hard jets broke into drops and spray; and as the slowly turning pipe showed its holes near the top and a few drops from the hissing wing above touched Edwin, he would run away over the slippery lawn, shouting as a chill shower shocked him, helped by a wind. But at best the sprinkler was something we had to put up with on days when we were denied the real thing. School lasted until the end of June, but on weekend afternoons Mrs. Mullhouse would take Edwin, Karen, and me on the long drive to Soundview Beach. Wearing bathing suits and t-shirts we entered the steaming Studebaker and felt the hot leather against our thighs. Edwin always sat in front, on a white towel. Crossing his thin legs, barred by light, he would lean back with a book, perhaps a comic or some blue-covered biography from The Childhood of Famous Americans Series ( Oliver Hazard Perry: Boy of the Sea, Andy Jackson: Boy Soldier, Buffalo Bill: Boy of the Plains, Peter Stuyvesant: Boy with Wooden Shoes ). It is here that the humble biographer in his rude cave longs for the golden wings of imagination. For while Karen and I watched the landscape pass through its familiar changes, the houses melting into open fields and long factories, a marsh, an airport, a roadside stand heaped with fruit and corn, Edwin was on a whaling expedition on the high seas or searching for gold with a pack of huskies in the Klondike; and when from time to time he lowered his book to gaze out the side window, for the first hazy seconds he must have experienced the moving landscape as a memory or a dream; while at other times, when he closed his book and fixed his attention on the familiar scene, the eyelashes I was watching would cease to blink, and in the rearview mirror I could see those eyes staring at nothing I could see, two polished lenses, focused on infinity. Edwin never lost what I shall call his capacity for revery, but which he once called, with typical melodramatic verve, the ability to die.

Stepping from the car was an adventure. The sandstrewn pavement of the parking lot gave way to a fringe of tickly grass, where we cooled our feet in preparation for the tar of the seaside road. Once across we stood in grassy sand and steeled ourselves for the long trek across the burning desert, where the danger was less to the soles than to the tender skin on the crest of the foot, over which the bright sand tumbled in scalding waves. Mrs. Mullhouse, dressed in her beach uniform of wide-brimmed straw hat, green sunglasses, black bathing suit, straw sandals, and straw pocketbook slung over a shoulder, carried a blanket over one arm and walked behind with little Karen as Edwin and I, carrying our towels around our necks, hurried ahead over the crest of sand down to the cool brown rim at the water’s edge. But before we could enter the water we had to return to the hot part of the sand and help Mrs. Mullhouse lay the blanket. The spot she chose was always far from the water (“You don’t expect me to sit right in the water, like a fish”) and always as far as possible from the crowded section where colored blankets formed a vast broken quilt (“You don’t expect me to sit in everybody’s lap”); and it was always with an air of solemnity that she officiated at the laying-out ceremony, during which each of us had to take an end. There were three rules: the blanket had to be free of wrinkles, the sand underneath had to be free of ripples, and the blanket had to be free of sand. Then with warnings not to kick sand on the blanket, not to go over our heads, and not to stay in too long, since Mrs. Mullhouse believed that terrible sunburns occurred in the water, at last she released us, and we rushed down to the water as with great care she began to fold all the towels and lay them in a neat pile at one corner of the blanket. At high tide I liked to plunge right in; but not Edwin. Oh no. For now his own elaborate ceremony began. Walking alone along the shore to a distant and unpopulated section of ocean, he advanced inch by cautious inch into the chill water, dividing his body mentally into sections and preparing each higher stage by preliminary wettings. You stayed out of his way while all this was taking place. From far away we watched him — we, for Mrs. Mullhouse and Karen had by now come down to my part of the water. Poor Edwin. The area of the bathing suit was crucial and often caused him to retreat; he would stand with his hands on his hips and stare down frowning at the dark wet edges of his bathing shorts, as if he had gotten them wet by mistake and had ruined a good piece of clothing. But always a wave would take him by surprise, wetting him a few inches higher than the waterline he had established, so that making a virtue of necessity he would advance boldly up to the new line, waiting for the inevitable cold shock that would propel him forward to his waist. But at waist level he would clench his teeth with the sudden discovery of a more chilling wetness, for he had been concentrating so intensely on the sensations of his wet bathing suit that he had forgotten the pure contact of water on naked unprotected flesh, and the first wave to ripple against his thin stomach would cause a rash of goosebumps all over his arms, accompanied by a shocked stiffening of muscles, as if he had seen a shark. And now the thought of advancing any farther was as fantastic as the thought of inhaling underwater; and his mind’s argument that parts of his body were now actually immersed and comfortable in the freezing waves seemed to his body devious, implausible, and theoretical. And so he decided to return to the blanket and lie down in the sun. But as soon as he began to turn back he discovered a new shock of cold, for the submerged parts of his body had been protected by the water from a breeze he had somehow failed to notice, a breeze that combined with his wetness to form an icy wind. And so he quickly returned to waist level, determined to stand motionless indefinitely until some elegant solution to his perplexity should be found. Meanwhile he rose on his toes or jumped with the advancing waves in order to preserve his waterline. He looked about continually, moving to the left or right whenever someone in the water threatened to shorten the distance between them; and far down the shore, at the water’s edge, he could see his mother standing ankle-deep, holding Karen’s hand, and myself splashing around nearby, watching him. Alone in his private tract of water, he seemed a nervous seabird, frail, alert, unknowable. In fantasy I see him rising from the water with a slow motion of dripping wings. But at last, and suddenly; with pride in his boldness, with terror of pain, with joy at the solution of a difficult problem, and with a look of surprise, Edwin crouched in the water up to his neck.