What I Loved

bought elaborately illustrated ABC books with large colored letters. "Ball," she would say and point to the picture of a beach ball. "B-A-L-L." But Matthew wanted nothing of balls and B 's. "Read the Seven Ravens, Mommy," he would say, and Erica would put down the tedious new alphabet book and pick up our tattered copy of Grimm's Fairy Tales.
    I sometimes thought that Matt saw too much, that his eyes and brain were so flooded with the world's astounding particularity that the same gift that had made him sensitive to the habits of flies, to cracks in cement, and the way belts buckled made it difficult for him to learn to read. It took my son a long time to understand that in English words moved from left to right on a page and that the gaps between the clusters of letters signified a break between words.
    Mark and Matthew played together every afternoon after school while Grace handed out carrot sticks and bits of apple, read them stories, and negotiated the occasional dispute. That daily routine was broken in February. Bill explained to me that Mark had been "very upset" after his mother's Christmas visit and that he and Lucille had decided together that Mark would be better off with her in Texas. I didn't press Bill for details. The few times he spoke to me about his son, his soft voice would tighten and his eyes would settle somewhere beyond me — on a wall or a book or a window. Bill made three visits to Houston that spring. During those long weekends, he and Mark holed up in a motel, watched cartoons, took walks, played with Star Wars men, and read "Hansel and Gretel." "That's all he wants to hear — over and over and over again," Bill said. "I know it by heart." Bill had to leave Mark with his mother, but he took the story with him and began to work on a series of constructions that would become his own version of the tale. By the time Hansel and Gretel was finished, Lucille and Mark were living in New York again. She had been offered another year of teaching at Rice but had turned it down.
    Not long after Mark left for Texas, Gunna died. The death of this imaginary boy, who had been around for two years, was followed by the arrival of a new person Matt called "the Ghosty Boy." When Erica asked Matt how Gunna died, he told her, "He got too old and couldn't live anymore."
    One evening after his story, Erica and I were sitting on the end of Matt's bed. "I have the Ghosty Boy feeling," he said.
    "Who's the Ghosty Boy?" Erica asked, leaning over him. She put her lips to his forehead.
    "He's a boy in my dreams."
    "Do you dream about him a lot?" I asked.
    Matt nodded. "He doesn't have a face and he can't talk, but he can fly. Not like Peter Pan, just a little bit off the ground and then he sinks down. Sometimes he's here, but other times he's away."
    "Where does he go?" Erica asked.
    "I don't know. I've never been there."
    "Does he have a name," I said, "other than Ghosty Boy?"
    "Yes, but he can't talk, Dad, so he can't say!"
    "Oh yes, I forgot."
    "He doesn't frighten you, does he, Matt?" Erica said. "No, Mom," he said. "He's kind of in me, you see. Half in me, and half out of me, and I know he's not really real."
    We accepted this cryptic explanation and kissed Matt good night. The Ghosty Boy came and went for years. After a while he became a memory for Matt, a personage he would refer to in the past tense. Erica and I came to understand that the boy was a damaged creature, someone to be pitied. Matthew would shake his head when he talked about the boy's feeble attempts at flight, which lifted him only inches off the ground. His tone was oddly superior. He talked as if he, Matthew Hertzberg, unlike his figment, were soaring regularly over New York City with a large and highly efficient pair of wings.
    The Ghosty Boy was still active when Violet defended her dissertation in May. She and Erica spent hours discussing what Violet should wear for the event. When I interrupted them to say that defense committees never look at a doctoral candidate's clothes, Erica cut me off. "You're not a woman. What do you know?" Violet decided on a conservative skirt, a blouse, and low heels, but underneath she wore a whalebone corset that she had rented from a costume company in the Village. Before she left for her defense, she appeared in our doorway to model herself. "The corset's for good luck," Violet said as she spun around for me and Erica. "It makes me feel closer to my hysterics, but it also squishes me in the right places."