When, wandering through the Museum of Modern Art, I come upon the piece of sculpture by Alberto Giacometti with the title “Palace at 4 A.M.,” I always stand and look at it — partly because it reminds me of my father’s new house in its unfinished state and partly because it is so beautiful. It is about thirty inches high and sufficiently well known that I probably don’t need to describe it. But anyway, it is made of wood, and there are no solid walls, only thin uprights and horizontal beams. There is the suggestion of a classic pediment and of a tower. Flying around in a room at the top of the palace there is a queer-looking creature with the head of a monkey wrench. A bird? a cross between a male ballet dancer and a pterodactyl? Below it, in a kind of freestanding closet, the backbone of some animal. To the left, backed by three off-white parallelograms, what could be an imposing female figure or one of the more important pieces of a chess set. And, in about the position a basketball ring would occupy, a vertical, hollowed-out spatulate shape with a ball in front of it.
It is all terribly spare and strange, but no stranger than the artist’s account of how it came into being. “This object took shape little by little in the late summer of 1932; it revealed itself to me slowly, the various parts taking their exact form and their precise place within the whole. By autumn it had attained such reality that its actual execution in space took no more than one day. It is related without any doubt to a period in my life that had come to an end a year before, when for six whole months hour after hour was passed in the company of a woman who, concentrating all life in herself, magically transformed my every moment. We used to construct a fantastic palace at night — days and nights had the same color, as if everything happened just before daybreak; throughout the whole time I never saw the sun — a very fragile palace of matchsticks. At the slightest false move a whole section of this tiny construction would collapse. We would always begin it over again. I don’t know why it came to be inhabited by a spinal column in a cage — the spinal column this woman sold me one of the very first nights I met her on the street — and by one of the skeleton birds that she saw the very night before the morning in which our life together collapsed — the skeleton birds that flutter with cries of joy at four o’clock in the morning very high above the pool of clear, green water where the extremely fine, white skeletons of fish float in the great unroofed hall. In the middle there rises the scaffolding of a tower, perhaps unfinished or, since its top has collapsed, perhaps also broken. On the other side there appeared the statue of a woman, in which I recognize my mother, just as she appears in my earliest memories. The mystery of her long black dress touching the floor troubled me; it seemed to me like a part of her body, and aroused in me a feeling of fear and confusion….”
I seem to remember that I went to the new house one winter day and saw snow descending through the attic to the upstairs bedrooms. It could also be that I never did any such thing, for I am fairly certain that in a snapshot album I have lost track of there was a picture of the house taken in the circumstances I have just described, and it is possible that I am remembering that rather than an actual experience. What we, or at any rate what I, refer to confidently as memory — meaning a moment, a scene, a fact that has been subjected to a fixative and thereby rescued from oblivion — is really a form of storytelling that goes on continually in the mind and often changes with the telling. Too many conflicting emotional interests are involved for life ever to be wholly acceptable, and possibly it is the work of the storyteller to rearrange things so that they conform to this end. In any case, in talking about the past we lie with every breath we draw.
Before the stairway was in, there was a gaping hole in the center of the house and you had to use the carpenters’ rickety ladder to get to the second floor. One day I looked down through this hole and saw Cletus Smith standing on a pile of lumber looking at me. I suppose I said, “Come on up.” Anyway, he did. We stood looking out at the unlit streetlamp, through a square opening that was someday going to be a window, and then we climbed up another ladder and walked along horizontal two-by-sixes with our arms outstretched, teetering like circus acrobats on the high wire. We could have fallen all the way through to the basement and broken an arm or a leg but we didn’t.
Boys don’t need much of an excuse to get on well together, if they get on at all. I was glad for his company, and pleased when he turned up the next day. If I saw him now the way he was then, I don’t know that I would recognize him. I seem to remember his smile, and that he had large hands and feet for a boy of thirteen. And Cletus Smith isn’t his real name.
Did I know him because he was in my room at school? I try to picture him standing at the blackboard and can’t. It is so long ago. Were we in the same Boy Scout troop, which would have meant that at some time during that fall we had studied the Scout manual together and practiced tying reef knots and clove hitches and running bowlines, and considered what merit badges we would try for next? I don’t know the answer. I only know that I knew him. From somewhere. And that we played together in that unfinished house day after day, risking our necks and breathing in the rancid odor of sawdust and shavings and fresh-cut lumber.
Ninth Street was an extension of home, and perfectly safe. Nobody ever picked on me there. When I passed beyond Ninth Street, it could be rough going. The boys in the eighth grade dominated the school yard before school and at recess time. They were, by turns, good-natured in a patronizing way, or mean, or foulmouthed about girls, or single-mindedly bent on improving their proficiency in some sport. Sometimes they would go to the trouble of twisting a younger boy’s arm behind his back or put a foot out and trip him as he ran past, and if he fell and hurt himself they were happy for a whole quarter of an hour afterward, but their attention seldom settled on any one boy for very long.
Looking back, it seems clear enough that I brought my difficulties on myself. To begin with, I was as thin as a stick. In any kind of competitive game, my mind froze and I became half-paralyzed. The baseball could be counted on to slip through my overanxious fingers. Nobody wanted me on their team. I was a character. I also had the unfortunate habit, when called on in class, of coming up with the right answer. It won me a smile of approval from the teacher, and it was nice to see my name on the Honor Roll. It was not nice to be chased home from school by two coal miners’ sons who were in the same room with me but only because they could not escape from the truant officer. Nowhere was I safe against them — neither in the classroom, where their eyes were always on me, or in the school yard, where they danced around me, pushing me off balance and trying to get me to fight back so they could clean up on me.
All this took place in plain sight of everybody, all the boys I had grown up with, and no hand was ever raised in my defense, nobody ever came to my rescue — I expect partly because they had their own vulnerabilities and did not want to be singled out for attack, but obviously there was something in me that invited it. Since I did not know what it was, I couldn’t do anything to change it, and any emotion I felt — physical inadequacy, fear, humiliation, the whole repertoire of the adolescent — showed in my face. I was such easy game that I wonder that their pleasure in tormenting me lasted as long as it did. When they were fourteen they dropped out of school and I never saw them again. Where else could they have gone but down in the mine with their fathers? If somebody told me they had contracted black lung I don’t know that I could manage to be sorry.
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