What I Loved

now. The boxes were like three tangible dreams Bill had dreamed when his life split between Lucille and Violet. Whether Bill knew it or not, the little figure of a woman dressed like a man was another self-portrait. Augustine was the fictional child he and Violet had made together. Her escape into that familiar street was also Bill's escape, and I have never stopped thinking about what Augustine left behind her in the rooms of that same box — a tiny coffin and the word key. Bill could easily have put a real key into that white room, but he had chosen not to.
    Erica and I both wondered if we hadn't been wrong to take Matt to the gallery to see the hysteria boxes. After his first visit, he begged for more excursions to "Bernie's house." A bowl of tin-foil-wrapped chocolates that lay on the front desk was partly responsible for luring Matt back to the gallery, but he also liked the way Bernie talked to him. Bernie didn't modulate his voice into the condescending tones grown-ups usually adopt for children. "Hey, Matt," he would say, "I've got something in the back room you might like. It's a cool sculpture of a baseball mitt with some hairy stuff growing out of it." After one of these invitations, Matt would straighten himself up and walk in a slow and dignified manner behind Bernie. He was only six years old and already he had pretensions. But more than anyone or anything in the Weeks Gallery, Matt loved the monstrous little girl in the second hysteria piece. A hundred times, I lifted him up so that he could open the door and peek in at the screaming child.
    "What is it you like so much about that little doll, Matt?" I finally asked him one afternoon after I set him down on the floor.
    "I like to see her underpants," he said matter-of-factly.
    "Your kid?" a voice said.
    When I looked up, I saw Henry Hasseborg. He was wearing a black sweater, black pants, and had tossed a red scarf around his neck and over one sloping shoulder in the manner of a French student. This overt touch of vanity made me pity him for a moment. He squinted down at Matt, then up at me. "Just making the rounds," he said in a voice that was unnecessarily loud. "I missed the opening, but I certainly heard about it. Made a dull roar among the cognoscenti. Good piece of writing by the way," he continued casually. "Of course, you're just the man for it with all your training in the old masters." He drawled out the last two words and made quotation gesture with his fingers.
    "Thank you, Henry," I said. "I'm sorry I can't stay and talk, but Matthew and I were just leaving."
    We left Hasseborg with his red nose inside one of Bill's doors.
    "That was a funny man," Matt said to me on the street as he took my hand.
    "Yes," I said. "He's funny, but you know he can't help the way he looks."
    "But he talks funny, too, Dad." Matt stopped walking and I waited. I could see that he was thinking hard. My son thought with his face in those days. His eyes narrowed. He screwed up his nose and tightened his mouth. After several seconds, he said, "He talks like me when I'm pretending." Matt deepened his voice, "Like this — I'm Spiderman. "
    I stared down at Matthew. "Well, you're right, Matt," I said. "He is pretending."
    "But who is he pretending to be?" Matt asked.
    "Himself," I said.
    Matt laughed at this and said, "That's silly," and then he burst into song. "Ha, Ha," he sang, "Rumpelstiltskin is my name! Rumpel, Rumpel, Rumpel, Rumpel, Rumpelstiltskin is my name!"
    From the time he turned three, Matt had been drawing every day. His egglike people with arms that sprouted from giant heads soon gained bodies and then backgrounds. At five, he was sketching people in profile walking down the street. Although Matt's pedestrians had oversized noses and appeared to be moving stiffly, they came in all sizes and shapes. They were fat and thin and black and tan and brown and pink, and he dressed them up in suits and dresses and the motorcycle garb he must have noticed on Christopher Street. Bins overflowed with litter and soda cans on his street corners. Flies hovered over the debris, and he etched cracks into the sidewalks. His bulbous dogs peed and shat as their owners stood ready with sheets of newspaper. Miss Langenweiler, Matt's kindergarten teacher, reported that she had never seen such detail in a child's drawings in all her years of teaching. Matthew balked at letters and numbers, however. When I showed him a b or a t in the newspaper, he ran away from me. Erica