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

Inside, it was already twilight. The blinds were closed, and long dark curtains covered the vertical edges of the windows. The ceiling light shone like an afternoon’s pale moon. On the red rug beside his unmade bed lay a black checker, two of his father’s blue examination booklets, a big thin glossy book called Mowgli the Jungle Boy, and a long yellow pencil. On the bed under the map of the United States lay a lone pingpong ball. I sat down beneath the state of Texas, and the pingpong ball came rolling against my thigh, while Edwin sat down crosslegged in the center of his rumpled bed, staring gloomily at his purple right knee. “Play some checkers?” I ventured cautiously. “Mmm,” said Edwin. “Jump out the window?” I suggested cheerfully. “Mmm,” said Edwin. Ten minutes later he got up suddenly and left the room. When I heard him close the bathroom door I rose, tiptoed over to his bed, and squatted down before the red rug. With trembling fingers I opened the first blue booklet. It was blank. The second blue booklet contained, on the first page, a meaningless list of words and phrases, among which I recall: deadpan, deadbeat, dead heat, deadlock, dead letter, deathmask, dead center, and Dead Sea. On the second page was the single mysterious phrase:

bats with bibs?

Puzzled and disappointed I returned to my bed, where again the wretched pingpong ball came rolling against my thigh. When at last the door opened, and gloomy Edwin entered, I could not resist saying with a smile: “Was that you flushing?” But Edwin, who never remembered anything and never, never understood other people’s jokes, looked at me solemnly and answered: “Uh huh.” He then resumed his position in the center of his bed, and began to tap a little marching tune with his fingers against his right thigh. I coughed into my fist. I examined my palm. I inspected the ceiling, where in the glowing lightshade I discovered the silhouettes of half a dozen dead bugs. At 11:45 I said: “Well, I have to go now. Lunchtime.” And as if Edwin were intent on completing an analogy, suddenly his features became animated with true affection, and with absolute sincerity he told me how sorry he was to see me go.

IN DECEMBER I took up photography. I mastered film speeds, f-numbers, and focal lengths; I learned to use a range-finder, a light meter, a lens shade, a yellow filter. With the aid of a tripod I took pictures of star-trails at night, pointing my camera at the North Star; with the aid of a flash attachment I took pictures of myself in the mirror, carefully focusing at twice my distance from the glass. On weekends I went on photographic jaunts with Dr. Mullhouse and Karen, returning with shots of fire engines, tombstones, garbage cans, church steeples, and snowy vistas. I took pictures of Karen in her snowsuit, of Dr. Mullhouse photographing Karen in her snowsuit, of Mrs. Mullhouse pulling Karen on her sled; and there is an indoor shot of the Mullhouse family, taken with the aid of floodlights, that shows Dr. Mullhouse sitting on his chair staring vacantly at an upside-down book while Karen sits grimly on the chairarm glaring not quite at the camera and Mrs. Mullhouse leans in from the other side with a wild grin on her face.

Only once that winter did Edwin come briefly back to life. One morning in class he reached into his pocket and removed a slim black case that opened like a jewelbox; and removing a pair of round eyeglasses with colorless rims, quickly he slipped them on his face. I was hardly surprised, for Mrs. Mullhouse had told me about that trip to the eye doctor. Edwin was distinctly upset by his glasses: for the first few weeks he never looked people in the eye when he wore them, and he wore them as little as possible, taking them off twenty times a day and shutting them up in the case with a click. I myself had not yet acquired eyeglasses, and Edwin’s fascinated me perhaps unduly: they seemed the sign of a special wound, like the white slings and casts of boys who were reckless of their bodies. But the eyeglasses had two other, and opposite, effects: they made Edwin look strange to me, as if they were the outward and visible sign of that inward and spiritual strangeness I had felt in him ever since he had fallen so desperately in love with his book; but at the same time they made him once again familiar to me, for by troubling and obsessing him, by making him self-conscious, they returned him briefly to the world, and made him creep from his hiding place to re-inhabit himself as of old. And so he complained bitterly to me about the way his glasses pressed into his nose, and hurt his ear, and wouldn’t stay up, and wouldn’t sit straight, and blinded him, and killed him, and gave him headaches and eyeaches and stomach aches and backaches and lord-knows-what-aches; and once he even blamed them for a swollen gland in his neck. He complained bitterly, I say; and his complaints were music to my ears. We exchanged gossip. We chatted about this and that. We even had a few games of checkers after school. When I asked him about his novel he laughed and said oh, that thing. Once he actually discussed in a serious but confused manner the problems involved in writing his book: “And you see, there are all these words, nothing but words, what are these words, and there they are, so that’s what you’re faced with, words, words …” “Do you mean,” I suggested cautiously, “that the problem you face is the relation between your life on the one hand and your words on the other?” “That’s it!” he cried, and a moment later: “Well, no, I don’t know, what does my life have to do with it, what are you talking about, words, life, I don’t know. How’s April Showers, I mean May Flowers?”

But soon he was wearing his eyeglasses for the entire schoolday, taking them off only to and from school; and soon he was wearing them even then; and as the year turned, and the last snow melted in the shadows of trees and porches, again he retreated from the surface of his skin into his secret hiding place.

THAT SPRING, Edwin’s penultimate, I took up philately and mineralogy. I sent away for whole bagfuls of used stamps and wrote to the Geology Departments of all 48 state capitals. In the course of a month I accumulated more than 2,000 American stamps, of which 1,853 were duplicates. I received labeled collections of specimens from Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and New Jersey, and a jar of sawed talc from Georgia. I also began to go on long bicycle expeditions around the neighborhood, accompanied at times by Karen, who sat in the basket like an enormous egg, because Mrs. Mullhouse feared she would fall off the fender-seat. I showed her scenes of interest from the life of her brother, as if he were dead. I showed her the stream that flowed past the bakery into the tunnel under Robin Hill Road, where Edwin picked up his boats and refused to continue, and the steep street beyond the school where gray two-story houses with zigzag staircases rose to a bright red drugstore, once dark green, and the bland house beyond the bakery where Edward Penn had lived. One day we had lunch together at the end of Beech Street. It was a blue, too blue day, and as I sat on the root of the fat old tree, watching the shadow ripple and bubble on the water, years of memories rippled and bubbled in me, from the distant days of Edward Penn to the summer of The Family Newspaper. And suddenly I told Karen everything about Penn, the strange little boy who lived in a cellar; but I think she thought I was making it up, for afterward she said: “Tell me another, ’kay?” And so I told her all about Rose Dorn, the little girl who lived with a witch in the woods. At the end she wanted to know if Rose Dorn went to Heaven; I told her I didn’t know; and she wanted to know if Gray went to Heaven; and again I told her I didn’t know. “I know,” she then said bitterly, scornful of my evasions. “They both went to Hell because they were bad.” Somewhat taken aback by the strictness of her views, I attempted to give the conversation a lighter turn by saying with a twinkle: “And where will Edwin go?” But immediately she dropped her eyes, and hugging her knees and looking off across the yellow field she said evasively: “Oh you stupid. He’s still alive.”