The Bestiary Read online

  One day I lingered after class and asked if she would take me home for dinner. She was startled, but kind enough not to embarrass me, even as she turned me down.

  “I have a husband and two children, Xeno,” she said, “and I need my time with them. It wouldn’t be fair…”

  It wasn’t fair, either, when she wrote a letter to my father, expressing her concerns about me, including this incident. My grandmother got wind of the letter and grew cross with me, as she rarely did.

  “How could you do such a thing?”

  “What did I do, Grandma?”

  “Asking the teacher to give you dinner—like we don’t feed you here.”

  It didn’t occur to her (or if it did, she squelched the thought) that maybe this had more to do with the fact her own family never deigned to meet me, much less invite me to dinner.

  Her pride was hurt, and that cost me a beating. My father, who happened to be home at the time, had been content to rebuke me in passing when he read the letter; but hearing my grandmother’s complaints, confronted by the shame she so obviously felt, he got angry too—at her as much as me. He whipped off his belt, and lifting me by the collar, lashed me across the buttocks. I was furious, but I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of crying out.

  That night I went to bed, and choking back tears, tried to figure out how I could run away. I’d steal some money from my grandmother’s purse and pack food in a bag. Then I’d ride the subway to Penn Station and take a train west, high into the mountains, or stow away on a ship to a deserted beach, where I’d find a fisherman’s shack with a stove and a bunk, and never come back. Or maybe that ship could leave me in a place even more timeless and remote where, however briefly, I would share my mother’s company. My mother as someone I could touch, not just a photographic image or a phantom of my imagination or the name that on rare occasions slipped from my grandmother’s lips. Marina.

  When I awoke hours later, I saw something perched on my windowsill. Its wings, tail, and spiky crest were silhouetted against a yellow moon. I was frightened but also thrilled when I realized it was one of the two griffins that graced the parapet of the First National Bank, which I passed on my way to school. They fascinated me, lifelike, forever poised on the verge of flight. I always looked up to see if they had moved (they never did). Now one had come to my window. Or was I still dreaming, agitated by the day’s events, my mind in a ferment?

  As a child, the poet William Blake claimed to have encountered a tree filled with glittering angels. When he reported this to his parents, his father beat him. I didn’t make that mistake: I knew better than to risk another whipping.

  At the bank the next morning the griffins were in their usual positions, stony wings enfolded, on opposite ends of the parapet. It seemed something was different—that one griffin’s head was tilted left now instead of right. I couldn’t be sure, but in a world of infinite metamorphoses—only a fraction of which we’re privy to—who can cleanly separate the fantastical from the commonplace? Who would want to? Blake went on to encounter more ominous angels, and at the age of thirty-three wrote that there are vast worlds closed off to us by our five senses; that, entombed within the cavern of the self, we look out through narrow chinks.

  Perhaps, I thought, that griffin flew off to a new perch each night; or it may have returned to my own window many times while I slept. As with the fox, I couldn’t be sure whether I had been gazing into, or out of, the world of dreams. I did know that this had been a seminal moment in my life. If nothing else, I had learned that the monsters we suspect are at the door (or window) might in fact be there—and sometimes we even see them.

  MY FRIEND BRUNO MORETTI kept a menagerie. He lived in a two-family brick house with his parents and sister. His father was a captain in the Fire Department. His father’s brother was a policeman who occupied the other half of the house with his wife and four children. The two halves of the house were identical, like a Rorschach test, each with a yellow front door, blue shutters, and a cement walk through tidy rows of azalea bushes.

  Bruno was sickly. He had been born with one lung and barely survived a bout of meningitis. Everyone in his extended family indulged him. He had one sister, Lena, who was a year younger. Lena was very pretty, with braided blonde hair and deep gray eyes. I had a crush on her. I had never known anyone—especially another child—with so much reserve, such an aura of mystery. Even Evgénia seemed easier to read.

  Both of us outsiders of a different sort at school, Bruno and I had grown close. I was always welcome at his house. In the summer, the Morettis had weekend barbecues in the common backyard. We ate hamburgers and hot dogs, corn on the cob and mickies—Idaho potatoes tucked into the coals to roast. An AM radio blared top-ten hits. The younger kids ran through a sprinkler. Bruno’s mother and his aunt, bleached blondes who kept up a steady chatter, set out salads and side dishes on the redwood table. I welcomed the commotion, just as I did at school. I felt like a prisoner on furlough, away from the apartment where my grandmother was rapidly becoming a ghost and my father’s presence was even less substantial.

  Bruno and I spent a lot of time in his room, with his animals. Bruno was slight, with wispy brown hair and small hands and feet. He walked with a limp and wore thick eyeglasses. He suffered from migraines. As with his one eyelid that drooped, these were aftereffects of the meningitis. He had premature lines on his forehead and nearly transparent skin, and at times his lips were so white it seemed as if no blood were reaching them. He was by far the smartest kid in our class. A whiz who every year took first prize at the science fair.

  A number of creatures—some in cages, others roaming freely—cohabited in his room: two parrots, a lizard, a cockatiel, a monkey, a ferret, a family of tortoises, and two black cats that had been rescued from a junkyard. They were surprisingly harmonious. The cats and tortoises frequently beat a path to Lena’s room, and the ferret liked to sun himself on the windowsill in the hall.

  On his walls Bruno had tacked up pictures of extinct or soon-to-be-extinct animals he had cut out of nature magazines. The Hawaiian crow, the yellow ibix, the Talbot hound, the Comoros dolphin, the Carpathian vole, and the spotted squirrel of New South Wales comprised the first of six rows of pictures. It was a painful gallery: the doleful headshots resembled the grainy photographs of the newly dead in newspapers.

  Bruno and Lena knew all about each of these animals: habitat, extant population, food supply, and predators, which invariably meant man, either by his actions or neglect. The Hawaiian crow, for example, was being wiped out by a combination of sugarcane pesticides and California blue jays—recklessly introduced to the islands—that raided the crows’ nests for eggs. The ibix was being poached for its lush feathers in Brazil. Bruno received newsletters from animal rights organizations and was taken to their gatherings in the New York area by his father, a red meat eater who I didn’t think had lost much sleep over the Carpathian vole.

  Lena wanted to be a veterinarian. Bruno’s ambition was to become a field biologist. For my birthday he gave me a gift subscription to the magazine Animal Habitat, which featured articles on topics such as the night vision of the Tasmanian quoll and primate epidemics in the Sumatran rainforest.

  Lena and Bruno showed me what caring for an animal really entailed, nursing a two-week-old mouse with an eyedropper and cooling down a monkey with a high fever. Once I watched Lena bandage an iguana’s foot, deftly wrapping gauze and affixing tape even while the animal squirmed in her arms. She not only helped her brother with his animals, but in the basement spent many hours tending to a group of her own. They were animals too sick or injured to be kept at shelters: cats stricken with leukemia, birds with broken wings, a poisoned squirrel on the mend. There was a set of cages along the wall, a table, a sink, and shelves Mr. Moretti had built, stocked with medicine and bandages.

  Lena was born with a big heart. In Bruno’s case, I think his own physical infirmities had made him simpatico. He sometimes fell asleep at his desk, the dinner tray his
mother had prepared untouched beside him. But what he lacked in stamina, he made up for in patience. Bruno was the most directed person I ever knew. His focus rarely strayed from flesh-and-blood animals, their plight in a hostile world and the tough scientific work that might save them. He had little interest in their imaginary incarnations. Yet once he had had a powerful vision himself which he shared with me.

  “When I had meningitis,” he said in his high-pitched voice, “my fever hit 105. I saw an animal with three heads and a body that was lion in front, goat in the middle, and dragon in the rear. The heads of those animals, off a single neck, shot fire. I started screaming. My father ran in and said I was hallucinating. But I’ll never forget it.”

  A few years later, I would find the chimera featured in a book about fabulous beasts. Only one chimera ever walked the earth, in ancient Lycia in Asia Minor, where it devastated the countryside. It was killed by the young adventurer Bellerophon upon his wingèd horse, Pegasus—itself a magical creature. All that survives of the chimera is its name, which has devolved into a common noun, signifying the impossible or fanciful. But the chimera embodied a fiercer truth, which soon enough I would learn for myself: our illusions can ravage us as mercilessly as violence or disease. And the illusions of others, when they take on lives of their own, are even more dangerous.

  EVERY YEAR my father seemed to have more money. The size of the check that arrived each month became large enough to elicit even my grandmother’s approval. He didn’t suddenly begin to dress better or modify his other habits: twenty-cent cigars, cheap beer, riding the subway and never taking cabs. I found his stinginess with himself oppressive, and swore that when I had my own money I would deny myself nothing. Once I overheard him say on the telephone (to whom, I didn’t know) that, having stashed away his savings, he hoped to buy shares in a freighter. It sounded like a pipe dream for a lowly seaman, but I realized he had bigger ambitions than I’d thought. He would never discuss them, but perhaps they were finally being realized.

  My tenderest memory of my father is a weekend when we happened to be alone and I came down with the flu. My grandmother was away and Evgénia had the week off. Overnight my fever climbed to 104. I kept slipping in and out of sleep, but whenever I opened my eyes, my father was sitting by my bedside. Supporting my head, he raised a glass of water to my lips, laid cold washcloths on my brow, and made me drink a tumbler of cod liver oil and hot lemon juice (the sailor’s cure) every few hours. When the fever broke after two days, I opened my eyes on Evgénia sitting in the same chair; my father was out somewhere, and I wondered if it had all been a feverish hallucination. My mother must have known that side of him, I told myself, or she wouldn’t have married him. I had mixed feelings, for it was painful to know he could be that caring when he wanted to.

  He was away from home more than ever, yet he returned from his voyages with smooth hands and the faintest tan. When I asked him about this, he seemed surprised I had noticed, then replied blandly that he was supervising more and exerting himself less. In this, as in all matters, he had a disarming method of keeping you uninformed: he maintained a silence so profound that when he did share a few elusive facts, it felt like a deluge, until later you realized he had told you nothing.

  When he did come home, he visited his doctor or dentist, paid bills, and slept long hours. I usually received one full day of his attention. On a typical outing, we ate breakfast at a diner before attending a soccer match on Randall’s Island or a track meet at Fordham. He didn’t care for conventional American sports, and was bemused by my interest in baseball. His passion was Greco-Roman wrestling. Not the crooked circus of professional wrestling, but the “pure sport,” as he called it, still practiced by gifted amateurs. He saw it as a true contest, mano a mano; a manly pursuit, for athletes and spectators alike. Outside of collegiate competition, there was little Greco-Roman activity in the United States. Around Christmas a meet was held at Madison Square Garden, but my father was rarely home during the holidays. So we went to exhibitions at a small athletic club in Queens.

  Flimsy folding chairs and two tiers of benches surrounded the ring. The room was dimly lit and poorly ventilated, smelling of sweat and liniment. The spectators were hard-core aficionados, all male. They drank Turkish coffee and smoked oval cigarettes. I never saw my father so engaged by any activity—or so talkative. He watched intently, commenting on the various holds, the precise footwork and positioning. He referred to the wrestlers by nicknames, “the Goat” and “the Ram,” which they both lived up to. The Goat had nimble goatlike feet and, yes, a blond goatee, while the Ram, with unruly red hair and short legs, snorted loudly.

  In the ancient Olympics, my father informed me solemnly, wrestling had been second in importance only to the discus throw.

  “The wrestlers were naked, with olive oil rubbed on their bodies,” he explained. “They wrestled outside in the sun. Back then, it was part of a boy’s education: you practiced every day, just like grammar and numbers.”

  As we took our seats, he explained the basics. “See, the ring is perfectly square, twenty-four feet on each side. Most of the action takes place in that circle in the center. No holds allowed below the waist. No holds using the legs. No tripping. It’s all balance and leverage. Agility. Endurance.”

  The day we saw the Ram battle the Goat, my father pulled at his moustache and told me all the reasons he favored the latter. “Quicker hands…superior shoulder strength…lateral mobility—plus, he’s got the killer instinct.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “Look at his mouth. He never opens it. He breathes through his nose. Stokes his anger. Gets a fire going inside, but stays icy on the surface. That’s the sign of killer instinct.”

  I wasn’t sure, even at age eleven, that I agreed with this formulation; but I was interested if only for the fact that, in making it, my father revealed more of himself than usual. I noted, too, that, when animated, he expressed himself with the metaphor he knew best: coal stoking.

  He was right about one thing: the Goat was the more powerful wrestler, pinning the Ram, a more muscle-bound man, in less than a minute.

  For dinner we went to a nearby restaurant called Samos, run by two brothers from that island. Their specialties were octopus stew and stuffed peppers. They served retsina from the barrel and ouzo in blue shot glasses. Blown-up photographs of Samos’s landscape covered the walls. Also an illuminated beer ad in which Miss Rheingold 1961, wearing her crown, stood beside a faux waterfall that appeared to be flowing. The place was packed. The air thick with smoke. My father ordered me the peppers and for himself grilled bass and a glass of wine.

  We were in a corner booth. I was surprised to find that he actually knew several people on the premises. A furniture salesman in a plaid jacket who patted me on the head and introduced himself as Artie. And one of the brothers from Samos, named Manny. And, finally, a tall seaman with a buzz cut named Gus. I remember them clearly because they were the first men with whom I saw my father socialize.

  He was his usual self, though I did glimpse another part of him—if only a sliver. With Artie, who was also a habitué of the athletic club, he continued the wrestling patter, and he and Manny bantered about the food. But it was Gus who interested me the moment I realized he and my father had been shipmates. Another first. When Gus referred to their sailing into Caracas at night, pictures opened up in my head: flickering lights, murky piers, a windswept harbor.

  Gus called my father Teddy, which I’d never heard anyone do. Though at ease, my father maintained his usual reserve, sipping his wine while Gus threw back several ouzos and chain-smoked Lucky Strikes. Gus was already a little tight when he joined us. The more he drank and talked, the more restive my father grew. He was still under the spell of the wrestling, which he didn’t want broken. Besides which, he didn’t feel safe around people who veered, conversationally or otherwise. Also, I was there.

  Calling for the check, my father ordered me to finish my dessert, a thick rice pudding, whi
le he went to the men’s room.

  “Yeah,” Gus continued, “your old man and me have seen some places. Down in São Paulo an old woman read my future in chicken tracks. You know how?”

  I shook my head. He leaned forward, his breath like kerosene.

  “I give her five bucks. She wets down the dirt and has two chickens walk around while she talks mumbo-jumbo. Then she reads the tracks.”

  “How?”

  He shrugged. “How should I know?”

  “Maybe it’s a kind of alphabet.”

  “Maybe.” He lit another cigarette. “You’re a smart kid, huh?”

  “What did the tracks say?”

  “Eh?”

  “About your future.”

  He blew a string of smoke rings. “That I’d have three kids and live to be ninety.” He snorted. “Maybe the second part will come true.”

  “Do you have kids?”

  “Nope. Don’t like ’em. Present company excepted,” he added half-heartedly. “Anyway, for five bucks the old lady didn’t tell me much.” He laughed. “For another ten she said she’d cook me the chickens.”

  I tried to conceal my disgust. “Did she read my father’s future?”

  “No, he didn’t want no part of it.”

  “No part of what?” My father’s voice came up behind me.

  “I was telling him about the old lady in Brazil who read the chicken tracks.”

  My father grunted and examined the check. “Put on your coat, Xeno.”

  “You got a smart kid here, Teddy.”

  My father nodded while counting out some bills.

  “You never talk about him.” Gus was looking at me, smiling, but his eyes were cold. “I don’t know why not.”