CHAPTER 1

Boy with a Skull

i.

While I was still in Amsterdam, I dreamed about my mother for the first time inyears. I'd been shut up in my hotel for more than a week, afraid to telephoneanybody or go out; and my heart scrambled and floundered at even the mostinnocent noises: elevator bell, rattle of the minibar cart, even church clockstolling the hour, de Westertoren, Krijtberg, a dark edge to the clangor, aninwrought fairy-tale sense of doom. By day I sat on the foot of the bedstraining to puzzle out the Dutch-language news on television (which washopeless, since I knew not a word of Dutch) and when I gave up, I sat by thewindow staring out at the canal with my camel's-hair coat thrown over myclothes—for I'd left New York in a hurry and the things I'd brought weren't warmenough, even indoors.

Outside, all was activity and cheer. It was Christmas, lights twinkling on thecanal bridges at night; red-cheeked dames en heren, scarves flying inthe icy wind, clattered down the cobblestones with Christmas trees lashed to thebacks of their bicycles. In the afternoons, an amateur band played Christmascarols that hung tinny and fragile in the winter air.

Chaotic room-service trays; too many cigarettes; lukewarm vodka from duty free.During those restless, shut-up days, I got to know every inch of the room as aprisoner comes to know his cell. It was my first time in Amsterdam; I'd seenalmost nothing of the city and yet the room itself, in its bleak, drafty,sunscrubbed beauty, gave a keen sense of Northern Europe, a model of theNetherlands in miniature: whitewash and Protestant probity, co-mingled withdeep-dyed luxury brought in merchant ships from the East. I spent anunreasonable amount of time scrutinizing a tiny pair of gilt-framed oils hangingover the bureau, one of peasants skating on an ice-pond by a church, the other asailboat flouncing on a choppy winter sea: decorative copies, nothing special,though I studied them as if they held, encrypted, some key to the secret heartof the old Flemish masters. Outside, sleet tapped at the windowpanes anddrizzled over the canal; and though the brocades were rich and the carpet wassoft, still the winter light carried a chilly tone of 1943, privation andausterities, weak tea without sugar and hungry to bed.

Early every morning while it was still black out, before the extra clerks cameon duty and the lobby started filling up, I walked downstairs for thenewspapers. The hotel staff moved with hushed voices and quiet footsteps, eyesgliding across me coolly as if they didn't quite see me, the American man in 27who never came down during the day; and I tried to reassure myself that thenight manager (dark suit, crew cut, horn-rimmed glasses) would probably go tosome lengths to avert trouble or avoid a fuss.

The Herald Tribune had no news of my predicament but the story was allover the Dutch papers, dense blocks of foreign print which hung, tantalizingly,just beyond the reach of my comprehension. Onopgeloste moord. Onbekende.I went upstairs and got back into bed (fully clad, because the room was so cold)and spread the papers out on the coverlet: photographs of police cars, crimescene tape, even the captions were impossible to decipher, and although theydidn't appear to have my name, there was no way to know if they had adescription of me or if they were withholding information from the public.

The room. The radiator. Een Amerikaan met een strafblad. Olive greenwater of the canal.

Because I was cold and ill, and much of the time at a loss what to do (I'dneglected to bring a book, as well as warm clothes), I stayed in bed most of theday. Night seemed to fall in the middle of the afternoon. Often—amidst thecrackle of strewn newspapers—I drifted in and out of sleep, and my dreams forthe most part were muddied with the same indeterminate anxiety that bled throughinto my waking hours: court cases, luggage burst open on the tarmac with myclothes scattered everywhere and endless airport corridors where I ran forplanes I knew I'd never make.

Thanks to my fever I had a lot of weird and extremely vivid dreams, sweats whereI thrashed around hardly knowing if it was day or night, but on the last andworst of these nights I dreamed about my mother: a quick, mysterious dream thatfelt more like a visitation. I was in Hobie's shop—or, more accurately, somehaunted dream space staged like a sketchy version of the shop—when she came upsuddenly behind me so I saw her reflection in a mirror. At the sight of her Iwas paralyzed with happiness; it was her, down to the most minute detail, thevery pattern of her freckles, she was smiling at me, more beautiful and yet notolder, black hair and funny upward quirk of her mouth, not a dream but apresence that filled the whole room: a force all her own, a living otherness.And as much as I wanted to, I knew I couldn't turn around, that to look at herdirectly was to violate the laws of her world and mine; she had come to me theonly way she could, and our eyes met in the glass for a long still moment; butjust as she seemed about to speak—with what seemed a combination of amusement,affection, exasperation—a vapor rolled between us and I woke up.

ii.

Things would have turned out better if she had lived. As it was, she died when Iwas a kid; and though everything that's happened to me since then is thoroughlymy own fault, still when I lost her I lost sight of any landmark that might haveled me someplace happier, to some more populated or congenial life.

Her death the dividing mark: Before and After. And though it's a bleak thing toadmit all these years later, still I've never met anyone who made me feel lovedthe way she did. Everything came alive in her company; she cast a charmedtheatrical light about her so that to see anything through her eyes was to seeit in brighter colors than ordinary—I remember a few weeks before she died,eating a late supper with her in an Italian restaurant down in the Village, andhow she grasped my sleeve at the sudden, almost painful loveliness of a birthdaycake with lit candles being carried in procession from the kitchen, faint circleof light wavering in across the dark ceiling and then the cake set down to blazeamidst the family, beatifying an old lady's face, smiles all round, waitersstepping away with their hands behind their backs—just an ordinary birthdaydinner you might see anywhere in an inexpensive downtown restaurant, and I'msure I wouldn't even remember it had she not died so soon after, but I thoughtabout it again and again after her death and indeed I'll probably think about itall my life: that candlelit circle, a tableau vivant of the daily, commonplacehappiness that was lost when I lost her.

She was beautiful, too. That's almost secondary; but still, she was. When shecame to New York fresh from Kansas, she worked part-time as a model though shewas too uneasy in front of the camera to be very good at it; whatever she had,it didn't translate to film.

And yet she was wholly herself: a rarity. I cannot recall ever seeing anotherperson who really resembled her. She had black hair, fair skin that freckled insummer, china-blue eyes with a lot of light in them; and in the slant of hercheekbones there was such an eccentric mixture of the tribal and the CelticTwilight that sometimes people guessed she was Icelandic. In fact, she was halfIrish, half Cherokee, from a town in Kansas near the Oklahoma border; and sheliked to make me laugh by calling herself an Okie even though she was as glossyand nervy and stylish as a racehorse. That exotic character unfortunately comesout a little too stark and unforgiving in photographs—her freckles covered withmakeup, her hair pulled back in a ponytail at the nape of her neck like somenobleman in The Tale of Genji—and what doesn't come across at all is herwarmth, her merry, unpredictable quality, which is what I loved about her most.It's clear, from the stillness she emanates in pictures, how much she mistrustedthe camera; she gives off a watchful, tigerish air of steeling herself againstattack. But in life she wasn't like that. She moved with a thrilling quickness,gestures sudden and light, always perched on the edge of her chair like somelong elegant marsh-bird about to startle and fly away. I loved the sandalwoodperfume she wore, rough and unexpected, and I loved the rustle of her starchedshirt when she swooped down to kiss me on the forehead. And her laugh was enoughto make you want to kick over what you were doing and follow her down thestreet. Wherever she went, men looked at her out of the corner of their eyes,and sometimes they used to look at her in a way that bothered me a little.

Her death was my fault. Other people have always been a little too quick toassure me that it wasn't; and yes, only a kid, who could have known,terrible accident, rotten luck, could have happened to anyone, it's allperfectly true and I don't believe a word of it.

It happened in New York, April 10th, fourteen years ago. (Even my hand balks atthe date; I had to push to write it down, just to keep the pen moving on thepaper. It used to be a perfectly ordinary day but now it sticks up on thecalendar like a rusty nail.)

If the day had gone as planned, it would have faded into the sky unmarked,swallowed without a trace along with the rest of my eighth-grade year. Whatwould I remember of it now? Little or nothing. But of course the texture of thatmorning is clearer than the present, down to the drenched, wet feel of the air.It had rained in the night, a terrible storm, shops were flooded and a couple ofsubway stations closed; and the two of us were standing on the squelching carpetoutside our apartment building while her favorite doorman, Goldie, who adoredher, walked backwards down Fifty-Seventh with his arm up, whistling for a taxi.Cars whooshed by in sheets of dirty spray; rain-swollen clouds tumbled highabove the skyscrapers, blowing and shifting to patches of clear blue sky, anddown below, on the street, beneath the exhaust fumes, the wind felt damp andsoft like spring.

"Ah, he's full, my lady," Goldie called over the roar of the street, steppingout of the way as a taxi splashed round the corner and shut its light off. Hewas the smallest of the doormen: a wan, thin, lively little guy, light-skinnedPuerto Rican, a former featherweight boxer. Though he was pouchy in the facefrom drinking (sometimes he turned up on the night shift smelling of J&B), stillhe was wiry and muscular and quick—always kidding around, always having acigarette break on the corner, shifting from foot to foot and blowing on hiswhite-gloved hands when it was cold, telling jokes in Spanish and cracking theother doormen up.

"You in a big hurry this morning?" he asked my mother. His nametag said BURT D.but everyone called him Goldie because of his gold tooth and because his lastname, de Oro, meant "gold" in Spanish.

"No, plenty of time, we're fine." But she looked exhausted and her hands wereshaky as she re-tied her scarf, which snapped and fluttered in the wind.

Goldie must have noticed this himself, because he glanced over at me (backed upevasively against the concrete planter in front of the building, lookinganywhere but at her) with an air of slight disapproval.

"You're not taking the train?" he said to me.

"Oh, we've got some errands," said my mother, without much conviction, when sherealized I didn't know what to say. Normally I didn't pay much attention to herclothes, but what she had on that morning (white trenchcoat, filmy pink scarf,black and white two-tone loafers) is so firmly burned into my memory that nowit's difficult for me to remember her any other way.

I was thirteen. I hate to remember how awkward we were with each other that lastmorning, stiff enough for the doorman to notice; any other time we would havebeen talking companionably enough, but that morning we didn't have much to sayto each other because I'd been suspended from school. They'd called her at heroffice the day before; she'd come home silent and furious; and the awful thingwas that I didn't even know what I'd been suspended for, although I was aboutseventy-five percent sure that Mr. Beeman (en route from his office to theteachers' lounge) had looked out the window of the second-floor landing atexactly the wrong moment and seen me smoking on school property. (Or, rather,seen me standing around with Tom Cable while he smoked, which at myschool amounted to practically the same offense.) My mother hated smoking. Herparents—whom I loved hearing stories about, and who had unfairly died before I'dhad the chance to know them—had been affable horse trainers who travelled aroundthe west and raised Morgan horses for a living: cocktail-drinking, canasta-playing livelies who went to the Kentucky Derby every year and kept cigarettesin silver boxes around the house. Then my grandmother doubled over and startedcoughing blood one day when she came in from the stables; and for the rest of mymother's teenage years, there had been oxygen tanks on the front porch andbedroom shades that stayed pulled down.

But—as I feared, and not without reason—Tom's cigarette was only the tip of theiceberg. I'd been in trouble at school for a while. It had all started, or begunto snowball rather, when my father had run off and left my mother and me somemonths before; we'd never liked him much, and my mother and I were generallymuch happier without him, but other people seemed shocked and distressed at theabrupt way he'd abandoned us (without money, child support, or forwardingaddress), and the teachers at my school on the Upper West Side had been so sorryfor me, so eager to extend their understanding and support, that they'd givenme—a scholarship student—all sorts of special allowances and delayed deadlinesand second and third chances: feeding out the rope, over a matter of months,until I'd managed to lower myself into a very deep hole.

So the two of us—my mother and I—had been called in for a conference at school.The meeting wasn't until eleven-thirty but since my mother had been forced totake the morning off, we were heading to the West Side early—for breakfast (and,I expected, a serious talk) and so she could buy a birthday present for someoneshe worked with. She'd been up until two-thirty the night before, her face tensein the glow of the computer, writing emails and trying to clear the decks forher morning out of the office.

"I don't know about you," Goldie was saying to my mother, rather fiercely, "butI say enough with all this spring and damp already. Rain, rain—" He shivered,pulled his collar closer in pantomime and glanced at the sky.

"I think it's supposed to clear up this afternoon."

"Yeah, I know, but I'm ready for summer." Rubbing his hands. "Peopleleave town, they hate it, complain about the heat, but me—I'm a tropical bird.Hotter the better. Bring it on!" Clapping, backing on his heels down the street."And—tell you what I love the best, is how it quietens out here, come July—?building all empty and sleepy, everyone away, you know?" Snapping his fingers,cab speeding by. "That's my vacation."

"But don't you burn up out here?" My standoffish dad had hated this about her—hertendency to engage in conversation with waitresses, doormen, the wheezy oldguys at the dry cleaner's. "I mean, in winter, at least you can put on an extracoat—"

"Listen, you're working the door in winter? I'm telling you it getscold. I don't care how many coats and hats you put on. You're standingout here, in January, February, and the wind is blowing in off the river?Brrr."