The Boy Detective by Roger Rosenblatt Read Free Book Online Page A

DOWN THAT boom box!” I shouted to a group of boys loping down Broadway. I was walking with our children.
    â€œWhy do you hate our music?” the boys shouted back.
    â€œI don’t hate your music,” I said, smiling. “I hate you.” They laughed and turned up the volume.
    Truth is, I love Latin music. I find it thrilling, though I do not have a Latin bone in my body. But I can play a rumba on the piano, and a samba and a tango. And I can dress up like José Greco, black hat and all, which I did once in a while at home, to no family reactions whatever, not so much as a stare. On the street, whenever Latin music came blaring from a radio, I would improvise a dance. Spin aggressively. Snap my fingers like castanets. Clap my hands above my head. Flamenco me. Mortified again, the children would stage-whisper, “Dad!” and tug at my clothing to make me stop. “You’re embarrassing us,” they said.
    They were right. I ought to have behaved with more decorum. Yet secretly, I think, they enjoyed my dance. And embarrassment is thrilling in its way.
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    S HIT! M Y FATHER did things like that—jumping up from his chair and bleating lines from show tunes, accompanied by a clumsy soft-shoe. Only in his case, these outbursts of entertainment were joyless, as if he were assaulting the silence in his home, which he himself had instituted. Once in a rare while a hapless distant relative, in the city for a couple of days, would call and ask to come over for a visit. He would not have bothered had he known that my father’s mind had exiled all his relatives, seen and unseen, beyond Siberia.
    One Sunday, my father’s nephew, a pleasant gentle young man, phoned asking if he might drop in to say hello. He had just come from Buffalo with his new and happy wife. For over an hour, we made small talk in the living room—all except my father who, in his dark three-piece suit, sat on the bench in front of the bookshelves, saying not a word, even when directly addressed. Instead, in a low and ghostly key, he whistled the entire score of “Wish You Were Here.”
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    W HEN I WAS on my own in the vast apartment, little things drew my attention. A small square inkwell of my father’s, in which the black ink had dried on the inside of the glass, effecting a little wall of hieroglyphics. A maroon fountain pen beside it, with a tiny gold lever to draw in the ink. Photographs here and there. My father, mother, and I (age three) sitting on a low stone wall in Chatham, where my parents had rented a sea captain’s cottage. My parents strolling on the boardwalk in Atlantic City on their honeymoon—my dad in a black winter coat and a derby, holding a pair of suede gloves in his right hand; my mother in a slim fur coat and heels with bows and a gardenia corsage on her left shoulder. A snapshot of my mother and her sister, Julia, when they were counselors in a summer camp upstate; their flirty smiles. My father at sea in a white suit, on a boat to Honduras, where he served as ship’s doctor one summer. He rests his arms on a railing, and looks away.
    Faces and figures in the paintings. When my parents first moved into 36, they had nothing to put on the many high walls. They went to Gimbels, which was holding a sale on unpacked crates of hundreds of oils and watercolors, acquired yet never viewed by William Randolph Hearst on one of his manic buying sprees. Among the Hearst artworks in our home was a portrait of a French farmer, with ruddy cheeks and poorly drawn hands; an English landscape showing a boy and girl ascending a hill toward a castle that looked a bit like Leeds; and several moody Italian scenes of decaying structures, walls, and houses, from the late seventeenth century. The canvases were cracked like stale cake. My favorite was that of a dark bridge over a rushing river with alpine mountains in the background and a black leafy tree reaching out over the water like an