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

No one except Miss Coco called him Arnold or Arnie or Arn: his name was Hass. No one smiled when Miss Coco called him Arnold or Arnie or Arn. After the first morning he no longer brought his blue lunchbox to school, and he no longer wore a tie. He wore shirts of a single color, usually bright red or dark green, over tight black pants and heavy black shoes. In his pants pocket was a bulge that resembled a rock; in his shirt pocket he carried cigarette butts that he smoked in the bathroom. With a pearl-handled penknife he carved obscenities in all three toilet seats. One morning he appeared on the playground in a red-eyed stinking condition; inside he sat shaking in his seat, and suddenly vomited onto the floor. One day he raised his middle finger to Miss Coco, who sent him to the principal’s office. Another day he took a swing at the principal, Miss Maidstone, who swung back (they got along quite well after that). He always said “I don’t know” when called on in class. A special reading group was set up for him alone, one step below the lowest reading group, who were still on the first-grade level. His seat was soon changed to the front desk of the second row, two desks ahead of me and one desk to my left. He did no work at all so far as I could tell, aside from the inane sentences that he wrote fifty or a hundred or two hundred times in punishment for one of his endless offenses. Indeed he took to this work with a certain enthusiasm, which puzzled me until the day Miss Coco began scolding him over his shoulder. She had detected, in the middle of the page, certain sentences that I later saw when I happened to glance at the offending paper on her desk:

Arnold Hasselstrom is a disobedient boy.

Arnold Hasselstrom is a disobadient boy.

Arnold Hasselstrom is a disodebient boy.

Arnold Hasselstrom is a disobebient boy.

Arnold Hasselstrom is a disodedient boy.

He was always making things difficult for himself that way, turning punishment into a reason for more punishment; but the acute reader will realize that I have sounded the first note of the subtle chord that was eventually to connect Arnold Hasselstrom, that disobedient boy, with angelic Edwin.

Although Arnold Hasselstrom spent his time with the likes of Mario Antonio, Len Laska, and Frank Picirillo, flipping cards or pennies or jackknives in back of Rapolski’s, or shooting flaming matches from matchguns made from spring-clothespins, he was never really one of them. He seemed to hold himself at a distance, as if he were passing his time among them on the way to something better. I think he despised them. They for their part admired him in a confused fearful way and never really liked him or felt at ease in his presence. No one could ever forget the rock he had hurled at Billy Duda; it set him apart as someone a little crazy, someone who might kill you if you made a mistake. And there was another difference: his deadly earnestness. Unlike Len Laska or Frank Picirillo, he never fought for fun. But when he did fight, he never held back. I had observed with interest that, with rare violent exceptions, other boys fought according to a never articulated but clearly understood set of rules, as if they were afraid of their own capacity to inflict injury or afraid of setting off some frenzy in their antagonist; but Arnold Hasselstrom fought to kill. Not to win, but to kill. He conducted every battle as if it were taking place on a cliff. Once he got into a vicious fight with a fourth-grader and was pressing his knee into the half-dead boy’s throat before the older boys could pull him off. Another time he swung a baseball bat at someone’s head, grazing an ear. But he was not invincible. Once when an enormously tall and fat sixth-grader, prodded by Arnold’s enemies, was pushing him with the heel of his hand, Arnold aimed a vicious kick at the bully’s crotch. The fat boy caught his foot, tipped him onto the tar, and proceeded to beat him up mercilessly, bloodying his face and getting him into a hammerlock that made him weep with rage and pain until, for the first time, he gave up. As the fat boy walked away, Arnold Hasselstrom picked up a rock and flung it at his head, narrowly missing; the sixth-grader returned and beat him up again, leaving him in a heap on the ground with blood and breathclouds pouring out of his mouth. Edwin and I saw that fight, held after school on a bright December day; the sixth-grader looked terrified, as if he were afraid he had killed a little boy, and he hurried away miserably among his cheerless friends. Arnold Hasselstrom did not come to school for a week. The sixth-grader looked worried during the whole time and never picked on him again. It was evident that you had to risk killing him if you were going to fight him at all.

And always at the end of a dark tunnel, shining like a prince in a fairytale, sat Edwin: Edwin, the brightest boy in the class (reputedly), laughing at his own jokes, exchanging notes with pretty Susan Thompson, working on special projects with Jimmy Pluvcik or Kenneth Santurbano or this biographer at the back of of the room while the rest of the class had to read in their social studies books; Edwin, who was saved from being the teacher’s pet by his habit of gleefully pointing out her numerous mistakes in spelling and pronunciation; Edwin, master of the secret of success. Yes, I suspect that Arnold Hasselstrom was attracted less to Edwin than to a mode of existence that seemed the bright opposite of his own. In the Early Years there was a miniature toy that had enchanted Edwin: a little colored picture beneath a transparent plastic shield that seemed to be full of pinpricks. When you held it between thumb and forefinger and tipped it to one side you saw a slightly different version of the same picture, thus producing an effect of animation: a face with open eyes would become the same face with closed eyes, and by tipping quickly back and forth you produced a blink. Now let us say that the universe, for Arnold Hasselstrom, consisted of a ridiculous periwig, a frown, and a pointing finger. But tip it slightly to one side, in Edwin’s direction — and see the frown change to a beaming smile, the pointing finger change to an open hand filled with shiny pennies. The ridiculous periwig, of course, remained.

One evening in the summer after Arnold Hasselstrom’s death, as we strolled under streetlamps that had just burst into light although the sky was still gray, Edwin said, apropos of nothing: “But why didn’t he beat me up?” I knew immediately whom he meant. “Oh,” I answered lightly, “that old magic spell.” This was a reference to a private joke between us that Edwin was under the protection of a fairy godmother who kept him from physical harm in return for a life of spiritual unease. Indeed it was an astonishing fact about him that never once in the course of his spiritually tumultuous existence was he hurt in a fight. A combination of cowardice and cunning, if we would believe Edwin; but I think it was something more than that, something at once physical and spiritual. The paleness and frailness that made him ideal prey for an occasional prowling bully rendered him immune from the onslaughts of the truly tough: it was no honor to whip Edwin. Of course they would have destroyed him if he had asked for it, but unlike Kenneth Santurbano he never asked for it. In class he never thrust himself forward except to expose Miss Coco’s mistakes, his infectious humor gained him friends among the lower groups, and though he was outstanding in no playground sport he was good enough in all of them to be chosen fifth or sixth on a side (Kenneth Santurbano was always chosen last). But more than that, I cannot help thinking there was a kind of glow about him that warned off attackers, an emanation of spiritual particles that defined his difference; so that to strike him was not merely to risk breaking a very fragile and expensive vase but to violate a shrine. Not that he was totally immune, any more than Arnold Hasselstrom was invincible; indeed he was once saved by Arnold Hasselstrom from what could have been a very nasty fight. He fell into the faint beginnings of two or three other fights, all so trivial that I can barely remember them; each time he surrendered vigorously after letting just the right amount of time pass, so that his attacker had the illusion of having fought. But his general immunity was not won without effort. He exercised a continual vigilance, avoiding dangerous places and deliberately seeking out alliances among the strong. He cultivated a kind of distant friendship, for instance, with Mario Antonio, with whom he exchanged occasional jokes; and Mario’s approval undoubtedly protected him from numerous unknown enemies of the thin and pale.