Wrinkles: A Novel by Charles Simmons | eBook

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Wrinkles

A Novel

By Charles Simmons

OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA

CHAPTER 1

His mother taught him numbers before he went to school. First he learned the words, which he said as he unfolded, one by one, the fingers of his fists. He had different feelings about each digit. One was perfect and friendly. Its appearance resembled its meaning. Two looked more complicated than it was. At least if he drew it schematically, like a Z, and considered the middle line as a way to get from the top to the bottom lines it also resembled its meaning. Three was pleasing: its three points made it easy to understand and remember. He could add two threes by counting their six points. Four if he wrote it with an open top had four points. The system broke down with five, and five was hard to draw; but, since it was half of ten, quick and accurate things could be done with it. Six, although it was even, resembled an odd number because it was curved like three and five. Seven was the most difficult digit; it was hard to picture the number of units it represented: the best he could do was five units and two units next to them; it was deceptively simple to draw and somehow not to be trusted. He found eight appealing because it was paradoxical: it had the curves of an odd number, but because it was vertically symmetrical it was an appropriate symbol for an even number. The only way to deal with nine was as one less than ten, and, considering how high the digit was, he did well with it: two tens were twenty; therefore two nines were two ones less than twenty, or eighteen. This worked all the way up to nine nines: that is, nine nines were nine ones less than nine tens, or eighty-one. Zero, like one, was perfect. One day when he was five and confined to bed with a cold he recognized that the series zero to nine paralleled the series ten to nineteen, twenty to twenty-nine, and so on. He felt a great surge of power and wrote on a sheet of paper the numbers one to one hundred and fifty-one. Given time he knew he could continue creating numbers indefinitely. His mother checked the list for accuracy and showed it to his father that evening. His father was pleased and said that arithmetic had been his best subject in grammar school. Since his father had not gone beyond grammar school and since, as his mother said, his father was an extremely intelligent man numbers must be a large part of his father's intelligence. Arithmetic became his own best subject in grammar school. His second-grade teacher announced at the beginning of the year that henceforth four was to be made with an open top. This suited him, but it disconcerted the other students; they had all been taught in the first grade to make four with a closed top. The thinking now was otherwise. He pictured a convention of grownups coming to this conclusion, probably during the previous summer. Because he had discovered the decimal system for himself he knew the relationships expressed in the multiplication tables, but the teachers insisted that he and the other students learn the tables by rote. As a result, when asked to multiply, he ran through the memorized tables and in time lost his feel for numerical architecture. In the first year of high school he was taught elementary algebra by a buck-toothed eccentric; the admixture of letters diluted the elegance of numbers, and mathematics became his poorest subject. By the time he had entered the army he had forgotten parts of the multiplication tables—six times seven, seven times eight, eight times twelve—and he did poorly on the army intelligence test. He went to his commanding officer, explained the problem, and asked to be retested. The night before the test, he wrote down the tables, working out some of them by addition, and committed them to memory again. Now his interest in numbers, beyond such practical uses as figuring household budgets and checking bank balances, is mystical. He is struck by the recurrence of mid-eighties and mid-eight hundreds in his life. His house number when he was a child was eight-forty; his high school was on Eighty-fourth Street; he got off at the Eighty-sixth Street subway station to visit his first serious girl friend; when the Dow Jones average of industrial stocks is in the mid-eight hundreds he feels he should buy or sell. He will buy an electronic calculator and play with it in periods of stress. The effortless answers it provides to arithmetic problems within its scope will relax him as watching sports had when he was younger. One day when he is haphazardly drawing square roots from the calculator and squaring them to determine the inadequacy of decimal approximations he will realize that from childhood he had unconsciously thought he could be and then could have been a mathematician, and he will now realize that he could not. This will be a relief to him. In his sixties he will wonder if the recurrence of numbers in the mid-eighties in his history will apply to the end of his life.

CHAPTER 2

His aunt Mae lived with them off and on through his childhood. She had been the oldest child in his mother's family; his mother had been the youngest. His friends said that Mae seemed more like a grandmother than an aunt. She was thin, had gray-blond hair, fine features, and a wary look. She paid greater attention to him than to his brother and on Saturday afternoons took him wherever he wanted to go. She had done many things for a living; she was proud of having worked at exclusive seaside New Jersey hotels, in what capacity he didn't know. When she stayed with his family she earned money addressing envelopes; she had a good hand and would sit at a table by a window with a pile of envelopes and a list of names and addresses and work for hours without fatigue or complaint. Her pen had a gold loop on the cap, and she wrote with a perforated red rubber guard on her index finger. She wouldn't let anyone use her pen: "It might disturb the set of the nib." She had been married to a Texas widower who had worked as a hotel manager and river boat captain and had finally settled down on a Florida orange grove. After the marriage broke up she retained the man's name and occasionally told mildly heroic stories about him: once in Florida she found on the kitchen table a tarantula "ready to spring"; she called to her husband, who said not to move, appeared with a wet towel, and snapped the thing dead. He asked her why she had left her husband. Because he kept a loaded pistol on the night table, she said. He asked his mother the same question about Mae; she said that Mae liked to travel, enjoyed hotels and river boats but not the orange grove. When he got bigger he could do by himself the things he had done with Mae; still they stayed close. She agreed with his points of view, even when, he felt, she didn't understand them and even when they contradicted those of his father and brother (except when his father or brother was present). She answered questions generously, and since she had been many places she knew many things. However, he doubted some of what she said: she claimed that appendicitis was caused by swallowing apple seeds; food that took long to cook, like candy, was cheaper to buy in a store because of the price of gas; after a certain age one shouldn't walk barefoot in the sand because the grains worked through the pores into the blood stream. Mae took up little room and had few possessions. She owned one book, The Standard Cyclopedia of Recipes (by F. E. Brown, copyright 1910), which contained 1,001 recipes: how to stiffen hats, soften corsets, make imitation brandy, cure cancer (there were five cures for cancer, two of them "sure"). She would let him have the book for short periods but got anxious if it was out of her hands for long. When he was about to be married he told Mae and his mother that his fiancée had insisted he go to confession so that he could receive Communion at a nuptial mass, and he had lied to her about the going to confession. He thought it was an amusing story; however, Mae in a loud voice, which he had not heard before, accused him of self-indulgence and double-dealing—"and you've always been like that, since you were a baby," she said. He and his mother were taken aback: they thought Mae had been fond of him. He and Mae were then cool to one another, even after his mother reported that Mae was sorry for what she had said. When his father died he was glad Mae was around to keep his mother company. In her eighties Mae curled up on one of his mother's couches, didn't move, refused a doctor, ate little, voided little, lost weight. He put her into a hospital, intending that after a checkup she would be transferred to a home. In the hospital it was clear that she was dying. She was so frail no one was eager to find out what was wrong with her beyond the fact that there was a "sizable mass in the abdominal region." A nurse consoled his mother with the information that Mae was "not in pain," from which he gained a sense of how bad some deaths could be. No one came to the funeral home besides his mother, his brother, and himself. When his mother is the only survivor of her original family he will ask questions about the past, and often she will say, "Mae would have known that." "It may be hard to believe," she will tell him, "but Mae was a very attractive young woman, lots of men were interested in her." He will understand that his mother feels more fortunate than Mae because she has had a proper marriage and children. Near the end of her life she will say, "I'm glad Mae went first so she didn't have to be alone," from which he will conclude that she knew that neither he nor his brother would have attended Mae. "I always felt sorry for Mae," she will also say, "she was the oldest and got the worst of it." "And you were the youngest and got the best?" he will say. She will nod and smile.

CHAPTER 3

His eight years at St. Ursula's Grammar School coincided with the depression. Families could not afford to move from one neighborhood to another so that the student body stayed the same. The first grade was taught by Miss Thoma, who was pretty and young and told him that he always arrived at school with a smile. The second grade was taught by Miss King, whose breast once fell out of her brassiere when she was picking up chalk from the floor; she turned to the blackboard to put the breast back. The third grade was taught by Sister Noelita, whom everyone liked—boys and girls, bright and stupid, docile and sassy. One day she brought to class her twin brother, who was amusing and played the guitar. The class asked her to bring him back. She said she would, but he never came. The fourth grade was taught by Mother Ecclesiastica, the oldest nun in the school. She was brown and wrinkled and once whipped him and another boy with a cat-o'- nine-tails after ordering them to bare their calves by dropping their socks from the bottoms of their knickerbockers. His mother went with him to school the next day, complained to the principal, and there were no more beatings, not even with a ruler. Sister Noelita, again, taught the fifth grade; everyone thought this was great good luck. She left the order the next year, just before she was to make her final vows. One of his classmates said he would marry her someday. In the sixth grade, boys and girls, who had studied together, were separated. The boys' class was taught by Sister Barnabas, a tall handsome woman who said she preferred teaching girls. The seventh grade was taught by Sister Clement, a pleasant and sensible woman whose skirts he and some other boys tried to look up, through the grated landing of the rear exit, from which she oversaw play at recess. Sister Clement gave him the biography of a Catholic youth, dead twenty years, blessed but not canonized. She said the youth reminded her of him. He did not read the book; the idea of it made him feel like a fraud. The eighth grade was taught by Sister Immaculata, who held that modern inventions and discoveries other than medical ones were bad. For instance, radio waves made street noises carry farther, and therefore teaching was more difficult. She also claimed that the classroom floors were getting harder year by year. She told how her uncle, an independently wealthy man, had developed from herbs a cure for cancer. However, he had taken the secret with him to the grave. "May God forgive him," she said. Following on the cue, one boy asked whether her uncle's refusal to share his discovery with mankind was a mortal sin. Her eyes glistened with tears as she said that it was not for her to judge. A couple, friends of Sister Immaculata, asked her to take their son into her class; the boy had been expelled from a number of schools. She explained to the class that this boy came from a privileged background and was spoiled. The boy had a big head. The class rallied against the boy, and after three months the boy was put on trial. Sister Immaculata appointed a prosecuting attorney, a defense attorney, and the jury; she was the judge. After two days of argument, the boy was found guilty of being a cheat, a coward, and a bully. In passing sentence, Sister Immaculata said that the trial had been punishment enough, that the boy had obviously been taught a lesson, and that she hoped he would turn over a new leaf. The church organist was a frail, slow-gaited, gray-haired man who was said to have once been a religious. The organist and his wife had an idiot son, who stumbled and slavered. Sister Immaculata confided to the class that the boy may have been God's punishment for past sins of one or both of the parents. Every now and then he drives past the church and school, always at night. Like so many landmarks of his childhood, these seem to have become smaller. The once German and Irish neighborhood is black and brown. By happenstance one of the older boys in a family from his early summer community is pastor now. He hears from friends that this priest is bitter at having been assigned to a poor parish. The local candy store and the garages that served the nearby middle-class Jewish population remain. In a few years he will, on impulse, take a newspaper ad calling for a reunion of his classmates. Three, all male, will come to a downtown restaurant—a police lieutenant, the manager of a hardware store, and an unemployed former boxer and stagehand. He will learn that the brightest boy of the class was an executive in a Maryland engineering firm and is now dead, that the boys who ranked second and third at graduation are also dead. He will wonder if there is meaning in this, since he was fourth.

CHAPTER 4

His mother was a practicing Catholic, his father a nominal Protestant; as a result he was brought up Catholic and religion was not discussed at home. His mother taught him to say prayers but only as a ritual. The world seemed to work without God's intervention, and although he did not depend on God he occasionally called on Him to avoid danger or discomfort. If, say, on going to bed he thought he might wake in the night and be sick to his stomach he would ask God to keep it from happening. Or he might ask his mother to agree to give him ten cents next morning if it did. Either measure helped him go to sleep. He had no problem with the idea of God until he went to school and nuns raised theoretical questions about dogma as if to answer them before they occurred to the students. If God knows all things, a nun said, does He know what we will do? The students all said yes. How can we have free will, then, the nun said, since if God knows what we will do before we do it we can't do anything else? No one could answer the question, and he found that the nun's explanation was like a magician's trick: he knew it was an illusion but couldn't figure it out. How can it be, the nun said, if God is all good, there is so much evil in the world? The answer—that man brought it on himself through the misuse of free will—was not satisfactory. Why did God give man free will if God knew man would misuse it? He asked the nun, adding that he would not have. But you are not God, the nun said, as if this were an explanation. He invented other questions for the nuns: Two infants are being taken to the church to be baptized; one dies on the way, the other on the way back; the second goes to heaven, the first does not. How could an all- just God have arranged things that way? When pressed like this the nuns would say the matter was a Mystery; one nun used the word Mystère, explaining that it was French for certain profound and beautiful turning points in theology. He and the other students were required to spend many hours in church; the ceremonies bored him, as did the prayers and hymns. To amuse himself he studied the profiles, half-profiles, and backs of heads of the girl students, who sat together on the opposite side of the church. By long practice during masses he trained himself to separate the fingers of his right hand alternately two- and-two, then one-two-one; he also mastered the exercise with his left hand, and eventually could perform one separation with one hand while performing the other separation with the other hand. None of his friends could duplicate the feat. On the black eather cover of his prayer book stamped in gold were the words GOD'S CHILD.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Wrinkles by Charles Simmons. Copyright © 1978 Charles Simmons. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Wrinkles: A Novel

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