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

At school he maintained a humble, humiliated remoteness. On the playground before the bell he leaned alone against some unoccupied portion of wall, resting one raised foot heel-first on the bricks behind him, while far away a flash of yellow braided itself in and out among a dark crowd. He was careful not to stand near her in line, and he avoided her in the long brown bootfilled coatroom. At his seat he sat bent over the adventures of Bobby and Betsy, never once raising his eyes. When, despite his precautions, some accident of a game or spelling bee thrust them together, he behaved with an intricate unawareness of her presence, as if she had dissolved into light. Rose Dorn’s method of annihilating him was more violent: she jerked her head away from imagined glances, ran in the opposite direction when he arrived on the playground, and pressed her face into the pages of her workbook when with his chair he came struggling past her to join the top reading group. But Edwin passed with lowered eyes, in serene humiliation.

And at last I began to understand. I began to understand that a secret force was at work in Edwin, a powerful and devious force that wanted to free him from Rose Dorn. Unable to forget her, unable to endure her, weary to death of the vain struggle, Edwin’s battered spirit had at last discovered its freedom: it conspired against her by taking her side. His powerful imagination was enlisted in her cause; entering her ravaged soul, it condemned poor Edwin to eternal damnation. Ah, he was so detestable that she could never look at him again. Ah, he was so abominable that she could never think of him again. Prince of mud, king of the dust, he was beneath contempt. He was lower than low, he was out of the question, he was nothing at all. Like a mad scientist in a foaming laboratory, Edwin had found the secret chemical. Slowly, cunningly, triumphantly, he began to disappear.

ON A DRIZZLY SIZZLY steamheated afternoon, three days after Edwin’s momentous lateness, a small and barely noticeable incident occurred, of which I was an accidental witness. I was sitting in my seat at Table 1, across from Rose Dorn. My eyes hurt from the strain of a tedious workbook exercise, and in order to rest them I gazed off at quiet Edwin in his seat at the back of the room. He was poring over his workbook with both arms resting on the table and his head bowed as if in shame. As I idly watched I noticed, in the blurred forepart of my vision, Rose Dorn turn quickly to look at him and quickly back. She saw me see her; and to my utter confusion, to my horror, she began to blush. And suddenly, for the first and only time, I was overwhelmed by a feeling of pity for Rose Dorn, who had lost Edwin forever. The feeling vanished instantly when she began to scribble vulgar mustaches and beards all over her workbook girls and boys. In the distance Edwin continued to sit with his head bowed, for all the world like some stone statue in a book.

That night I dreamed that I was seated in Edwin’s kitchen at the metal table with the white tablecloth bordered by red apples. Mrs. Mullhouse was seated across from me, wiping a wet glass with a piece of tissue paper that kept on breaking apart and sticking to the glass. Rose Dorn was seated between us, reading a book. The back door opened and Edwin entered, holding in his right hand a pair of sharp cuticle-scissors, curved at the end. He walked up to Rose Dorn and began to stab her in the neck, making large stripes of blood pour down, while Mrs. Mullhouse, now wearing a pair of blue rubber gloves, stuffed a yellow sponge into the bottom of the glass. Rose Dorn fell forward onto her right cheek, her face ugly with pain, and tried to protect the left side of her face with her hands. “Stop that!” I said, and rapped the table. Edwin slashed nimbly around her hands and between her fingers, tearing her left cheek with loud ripping sounds, cutting off pieces of her soft upper lip, and plunging the sharp point repeatedly into her closed eyelid. I leaned forward and tried to cover Rose Dorn with my hands, but her head was just beyond my fingertips. I began to cry, and Edwin, turning to me as if he had just noticed me, raised the bloody scissors over my head. At that moment I awoke, feeling as if the darkness were a huge stone crushing me.

THE EVENTS OF THE NEXT TWO WEEKS come rushing at me as I write, and I find I must make a special effort to place things in their proper order. My general sense is of Rose Dorn running across the playground with a wild look in her eyes, brandishing a stick from which a rusty nail protrudes — but of course my memory has borrowed that stick from Arnold Hasselstrom. Yet the false fusions of memory may reveal truths beyond chronology, and the fearless biographer, in his tireless pursuit of the past, must be willing to heed the kind of evidence contradicted by clocks. Which is not to say, with my witty friend, that memory is merely one form of imagination. The true course of events must always be carefully distinguished from memory’s false fusions, lest biography degenerate into fiction; and so, having presented Rose Dorn with the stick of Arnold Hasselstrom, I immediately return it to its rightful owner, with due apologies. Besides, she had weapons of her own.

She had no intention whatever of allowing Edwin to vanish in peace. On the very next morning after the incident recorded in the last chapter, she tried to trip him as he passed her table, carrying his chair to the top reading group. Mrs. Cadwallader noticed nothing. After the reading group he carried his chair all the way around the front desk and returned to his table by way of the windows. That afternoon as we entered the snow-patched playground I saw her standing by the side of the building with one foot resting heel-first against the bricks. In one hand she held a pink rubber ball. Edwin, who had suddenly begun speaking about the outlook for snow, proceeded to walk in a long curve toward the back playground. As he spoke he stared intently at me, as if anxious to gauge my true response by the involuntary movements of my facial muscles. I was arguing against the likelihood of snow, since the sky was cloudless and blue, when suddenly something fell out of the sky and landed at our toes, at once bouncing into the air. It bounced toward the wire fence in a diminishing series of hops, followed by bouncing Gray. Edwin said: “No, you’re wrong, look at the little cloud there, I hope it doesn’t snow, don’t you see the little cloud there?”

The afternoon passed without incident. As the top reading group began to assemble, Rose Dorn asked for permission to go to the lavatory, and as she left the room Edwin, who had begun to carry his chair from his corner of the table to the aisle by the windows, returned and made his way down the central aisle as usual. When, twenty minutes later, the top reading group was dismissed, he returned by way of the windows. Rose Dorn ignored him, and as the day passed she made no more than the usual nuisance of herself, drumming her fingers on the table, uttering vulgar sounds, shifting about in her seat, and flipping the pages of her workbook loudly. At the 3:10 bell we filed into the coatroom, where I was so intent on lifting my heavy wintercoat carefully from its hook, so as not to damage the little silver chain that mama had recently sewn in to replace the original elastic band, that at first I did not notice Edwin frowning at the empty hook a few coats away. “It’s gone,” he said. I said: “Are you sure you” but without listening he began to walk along the aisle, anxiously checking the coats on the left and right, making his way through everybody coming at him, and at last breaking free into the region that belonged to another class. I followed, double-checking. At the end of the central coatrack, where an open doorway framed the hall, Edwin turned to the left and began walking back along the aisle on the other side, checking the coats of yet another class. I was approaching the last coats on my side when I happened to stumble over a projecting boot. I kicked it in the shin. As I turned to check the coats on my right I automatically glanced underneath at the boots. There, like a corpse, lay Edwin’s coat. The dark blue cloth was filthy with dust, and one arm retained the blurred, dusty, but quite unmistakable impression of a foot.