Leviathan by Paul Auster Read Free Book Online Page B

when we got down there.”
    “Doris Saperstein, my old friend from the Bronx. She had two boys about your age. Regular little ragamuffins they were, a couple of wild Indians.”
    “Just normal kids. They were the ones who caused the whole dispute.”
    “What dispute?”
    “You don’t remember that part, do you?”
    “No, I only remember what happened later. That wiped out everything else.”
    “You made me wear those terrible short pants with the white knee socks. You always dressed me up when we went out, and I hated it. I felt like a sissy in those clothes, a Fauntleroy in full regalia. It was bad enough on family outings, but the thought of turning up like that in front of Mrs. Saperstein’s sons was intolerable to me. Iknew they’d be wearing T-shirts, dungarees, and sneakers, and I didn’t know how I was going to face them.”
    “But you looked like an angel in that outfit,” his mother said.
    “Maybe so, but I didn’t want to look like an angel. I wanted to look like a regular American boy. I begged to wear something else, but you refused to budge. ‘Visiting the Statue of Liberty isn’t like playing in the backyard,’ you said. ‘It’s the symbol of our country, and we have to show it the proper respect.’ Even then, the irony of the situation didn’t escape me. There we were, about to pay homage to the concept of freedom, and I myself was in chains. I lived in an absolute dictatorship, and for as long as I could remember my rights had been trampled underfoot. I tried to explain about the other boys, but you wouldn’t listen to me. Nonsense, you said, they’ll be wearing their dress-up clothes, too. You were so damned sure of yourself, I finally plucked up my courage and offered to make a bargain with you. All right, I said, I’ll wear the clothes today. But if the other boys are wearing dungarees and sneakers, then it’s the last time I ever have to do it. From then on, you’ll give me permission to wear whatever I want.”
    “And I agreed to that? I allowed myself to bargain with a six-year-old?”
    “You were just humoring me. The possibility of losing the bet didn’t even occur to you. But lo and behold, when Mrs. Saperstein arrived at the Statue of Liberty with her two sons, the boys were dressed exactly as I had predicted. And just like that, I became the master of my own wardrobe. It was the first major victory of my life. I felt as if I’d struck a blow for democracy, as if I’d risen up in the name of oppressed peoples all over the world.”
    “Now I know why you’re so partial to blue jeans,” Fanny said. “You discovered the principle of self-determination, and at that point you determined to be a bad dresser for the rest of your life.”
    “Precisely,” Sachs said. “I won the right to be a slob, and I’ve been carrying the banner proudly ever since.”
    “And then,” Mrs. Sachs continued, impatient to get on with the story, “we started to climb.”
    “The spiral staircase,” her son added. “We found the steps and started to go up.”
    “It wasn’t so bad at first,” Mrs. Sachs said. “Doris and I let the boys go on ahead, and we took the stairs nice and easy, holding onto the rail. We got as far as the crown, looked out at the harbor for a couple of minutes, and everything was more or less okay. I thought that was it, that we’d start back down then and go for an ice cream somewhere. But they still let you into the torch in those days, which meant climbing up another staircase—right through Miss Battle-Axe’s arm. The boys were crazy to go up there. They kept hollering and whining about how they wanted to see everything, and so Doris and I gave in to them. As it turned out, this staircase didn’t have a railing like the other one. It was the narrowest, twistingest little set of iron rungs you ever saw, a fire pole with bumps on it, and when you looked down through the arm, you felt like you were three hundred miles up in the air. It was pure