Providence Page 2

  This is the other half of Ishmael. This is the part that many readers sense was left untold.

  In responding to readers’ letters, I soon realized that the question “Where did this book come from?” doesn’t have just one answer. It has dozens, because Ishmael came from every part of my life. I saw that some of the answers could be found in 1975 and 1974. But then I saw that some of them could be found in 1967 and some of them could be found in 1963. And some of them could be found even before that, in 1953. Finally I realized that the real beginning of the book had to be traced back to 1941, to one of the earliest memories of my life, and that’s where I’ll start here tonight.

  They have the feeling that the origins of Ishmael must be somehow magical, and they’re right.

  Some patient biographer may discover that I’m setting this event in the wrong house or in the wrong year, but it’s the event that counts, not the house or the year. What I remember was that we were living in Mrs. Gilogly’s house on 32nd Street between Dodge and Farnum in Omaha, Nebraska. I don’t suppose any remnant of this lifestyle survives today, but it worked very well in the era of the Great Depression. Mrs. Gilogly’s was a huge old family residence that had been converted into a boarding house, which made for a very practical and economical way of life. We had the top floor, Mother, Father, Dennis (my older brother), and I, perhaps four or five rooms. I remember only a couple of the other residents, but I suppose there must have been half a dozen, all white-collar workers or university students. It worked out very well for my parents, who both worked, since Mrs. Gilogly provided a sort of ad hoc day care for me, who was the only really young person on the premises (my brother being seven years my elder).

  My parents were probably considered very modern, not only because they both worked but because they were very permissive with their children. Frankly, I doubt if this proceeded from any kind of principle, modern or otherwise. Mother liked the nightlife, such as it was in Omaha, Nebraska, at that time in history. They would come home from work, have dinner in the communal dining room downstairs, get dressed, and go out for the evening, coming home long after I was asleep. I think their attitude was that, since they liked to do as they pleased, it was only reasonable for their children to do as they pleased as well. I know that, at the very least, at the age of six, I would on Saturday afternoons, all by myself, take myself off to the movies, a mile or so away. I was a solitary child, even at this age, I don’t know why. I wasn’t conscious of being shy or special; I wasn’t conscious of being lonely. Until the event I’m leading up to, I wasn’t conscious of being anything, as far as I remember.

  One night in the spring of 1941 I had a dream. It was the middle of the night in Omaha, Nebraska, in this dream—truly the dead of night, every radio silent, every lamp dark, every car in its garage, every man, woman, and child in bed asleep. Only one human being was abroad in that dead of night, and it was me. I was trudging home after a movie, head down, one foot in front of the other, down the long, silent blocks, past the dark, silent houses.

  Suddenly I found my path blocked. A tree had fallen across the sidewalk. This was strange, because the tree hadn’t been there two hours before, when I passed by on my way to the movie theater. I say it was a tree, and it was, but it was a kind of dream tree. It was the essence of a tree, which is to say it was a tree trunk. If it had been an actual tree, I would have come up against a huge tangle of leaves and branches, and the heart of the tree, the trunk, would have been hidden and inaccessible inside that tangle, which means that what happened next wouldn’t have happened at all.

  One night in the spring of 1941 I had a dream.

  A great black beetle came scurrying down the length of the trunk to confront me, and I shrank back, terrified. I was terrified because all insects terrified me at this age and because I was sure the beetle was going to blame me for what had happened to its home, which was this tree. But the beetle spoke up immediately to reassure me. It wasn’t a matter of vocalization. He spoke in my mind.

  “It’s all right,” the beetle said. “Don’t be afraid, I’m not going to hurt you. I just want to talk to you.”

  I drew a little closer, fear giving way to curiosity. It isn’t often that an adult actively seeks communication with a six-year-old—and this beetle was definitely an adult. It had an aura of great wisdom and authority.

  It, he. I had the impression it was a he.

  “This tree was my home,” the beetle said. “Mine and others’, of course. Squirrels, birds, and so on.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “We’ll have to abandon it now, of course.”

  I said I was sorry it had fallen down.

  “That’s all right,” he said. “As a matter of fact, it didn’t just fall down. We felled it on purpose to block your path, so I could talk to you. There was no other way to do it.”

  I was dumbfounded, of course.

  “It’s really dark out tonight, isn’t it?” he went on conversationally, making small talk to put a small boy at ease.

  I said I guessed so, or something.

  The beetle seemed to reflect for a bit. Then, conveying a feeling of great compassion: “You don’t really belong here at all, do you.”

  I was surprised to hear him say this and asked what he meant.

  “I mean, you don’t really feel much at home in these streets, in these houses, in this world. You’re not really cherished here.”

  Now that it had been put into words by this wise creature, I suddenly knew it was true. I felt tears stinging my eyes, as one does at moments of great revelation.

  “The thing is,” he went on very gently, “you’re not needed here.”

  I nodded, unable to speak, too overcome with grief and with the great truth of what he was telling me.

  “Well, well,” he said, giving me a little time to recover. “But that’s why I wanted to talk to you.”

  “It is?”

  “Yes. Yes, it is. You see, you’re needed somewhere else.”

  I blinked at him in astonishment and said, “I am?”

  “Yes, you are. Very badly.”

  Once again I was dumbfounded. I opened my mouth but the word I wanted to utter wouldn’t come out. It didn’t matter; he knew what it was: Where?

  “There,” said the beetle, nodding toward my right. I turned and saw that the city lot beside me had vanished, along with its tall, dark house. In its place now stood a lovely forest that opened at the edge of the sidewalk, and I realized that the beetle’s tree had come from this forest and not from the city lot. The fallen tree was a sort of bridge spanning the two locations, which were in reality hundreds or thousands of miles apart. About twenty yards away I saw a deer standing motionless in a little moonlit glade, watching me with grave speculation. Then after a few moments the deer turned and disappeared into a thicket beside him.

  “We need to tell you the secret of our lives,” the beetle said.

  “He wants you to follow him, of course,” the beetle said. “We all do.”

  I tore my gaze away from the forest.

  “We’ll all be there, waiting for you,” he went on, and then paused as if thinking about how to explain. “You need to know some things, you see, if you’re going to help us. It will almost mean giving up your life, will almost mean becoming one of us.” Then he added, rather shyly: “We need to tell you the secret of our lives.”

  I understood that he was talking about something that was meant to happen in the future, but I saw no reason to wait. I didn’t want to wait and saw no reason to wait. The forest was there now, a step away, and I was entirely ready to give up my life to be in the company of these creatures, who needed me and wanted to share their secrets with me. In far less time than it takes to tell, I turned and stepped off the sidewalk—and was instantly awake. Instantly awake—and utterly heartbroken, sobbing uncontrollably until my mother came in to find out what was wrong.

  “Did you have a bad dream?” she asked, taking me in her arms.

  “
No, no,” I insisted. “It wasn’t bad!”

  She smiled at this. “Then why are you crying.”

  “I’m crying because—” But I was crying too hard to explain.

  “Come on,” my mother said, “tell me why you’re crying.”

  “I’m crying because,” I finally managed to squeeze out between gasps and sobs, “because—because it was so beautiful!”

  I hadn’t realized till tonight that the basic story framework of Ishmael is clearly derived from this dream, a fact I find quite amazing. In dream and in Ishmael an obstacle is laid across the narrator’s path—in the one the trunk of a tree, in the other an ad in a newspaper (which of course arrives rolled up like the trunk of a tree). In dream and in Ishmael the narrator is confronted by a dark, threatening creature who immediately sets out to reassure him with words spoken directly into his mind. Both creatures, bug and gorilla, are “not where they belong”—have thrust themselves into an urban habitat in order to encounter the narrator. Both creatures come to the narrator from a habitat that has been destroyed. Both speak to the narrator as representatives of a larger community, a community consisting of all nonhuman life. Both tell him this community is in need of help—and that this help can only come from someone privy to secrets unknown to his fellow humans. Both invite him to take a journey of discovery that will alienate him from his human family and friends.

  The purpose of the dream was to plant in me a lifelong yearning for its fulfillment.

  Having had it pointed out to you in this way, you would be forgiven for thinking that I must have deliberately patterned Ishmael on this dream—or must at least have been aware of the similarities between them. I assure you that neither is the case.

  What the similarities indicate, I think, is how deeply I accepted this six-year-old’s dream as a description of my destiny. From that age, I knew that, somehow or other, I would make the dream come true—or rather, that I would finish it. I hadn’t been allowed to finish it as a child—and this is exactly how I understood it at the time. I knew that its fulfillment was something that was to happen later. The purpose of the dream was to plant in me a lifelong yearning for its fulfillment. Someday I would be allowed to step off that sidewalk and enter another world. That someday finally arrived when the hero of my novel stepped off the sidewalk and entered the world of Ishmael.

  So you see that, even though I was unaware of it at the time, I endowed the narrator of Ishmael with a destiny that had been given to me in a dream half a century before.

  THREE

  Of course people don’t think about destinies all the time—especially not six-year-old boys. I forgot the dream. Forgot it and remembered it—forgot it, remembered it, forgot it, remembered it—never forgot it.

  Over the next ten years, the beetle’s words took on new meanings. Something was going on between my parents. I didn’t have any idea what it was and still don’t.

  On my birth certificate, my father, Herbert John Quinn—known as Bert and later as Q—listed his occupation as “Telegrapher” and his employer as E. J. Barrick, a successful Omaha roofer. Why would a roofer need a telegrapher? He needed a telegrapher because he had a curious sideline: He operated a sports book. This meant he needed a “line,” which was both a telegraphic line and an array of sporting information of all kinds but principally the betting odds and point-spreads on offer for all the events of the day.

  When Bert went to work for E. J. Barrick, he found his true vocation. I don’t mean he became a bookie; that was some years in the future. The bookie is the man whose money is at risk, and Dad had no money to risk at this time; he was just an employee. He manned the phones, took the bets, kept the books, and played the subtle mathematical game that, if skillfully played, makes it unlikely that the bookie will ever have a losing week, no matter what happens. Ideally, the bookie makes money on every event, whichever side wins. Bert was good at the game.

  In the early years, the office was just across the state line, in Iowa. I don’t doubt that my father was on friendly terms with the famous gangster Meyer Lansky, who at this time was involved with the Dodge Park Kennel Club in Council Bluffs. Moving in the same circles, frequenting the same carpet joints, and making payoffs to the same officials, they could hardly have missed each other for very long; both intelligent, businesslike, and temperate, they would have had a natural affinity for each other.

  Thelma, my mother, born Thelma Leona Warren, was also a telegrapher (she and Bert had met on the job in Florida) and brought in a second income through at least the early 1940s. Why she quit working I don’t know, but, as I reconstruct these events now, this seems to have been the beginning of all our troubles. With endless amounts of time on her hands, Thelma became an obsessive house-cleaner. She would literally spend ten or twelve hours a day cleaning a small apartment, then get up the next morning and start all over again at nine. She scrubbed the carpet twice a week with soap and water, on her hands and knees. She washed the walls once a week without fail. She vacuumed the floor and all the furniture twice a day, maybe even three times a day. She didn’t even bother to put the vacuum cleaner away between sweeps. She washed the windows every day, every single one of them, and every mirror. She scrubbed the kitchen and bathroom floors every day. When we lived in a house, she would sweep the walks twice a day, always going far past the lot line; she would even sweep the street, if she thought it needed it. What most people would consider a spring-cleaning she performed every single day, seven days a week. Christmas was no exception, though she let us open the presents before she started.

  I don’t doubt that my father was on friendly terms with the famous gangster Meyer Lansky.

  It didn’t have anything to do with cleanliness, of course. Nothing was exactly clean. You could run a fingernail along the woodwork and scrape up a long curl of dirty, dried soap. She scoured the paint off the walls, pulverized the carpets, beat the furniture to death.

  For the first few years of it, of course, I had no idea that this was odd behavior. Bert gave no indication that it was odd either but clearly found it maddening. He’d come home at six o’clock expecting dinner to be ready. Instead, Thelma was just finishing the bathroom and then had to vacuum the entire house. Nothing on earth could stop her. By seven o’clock he was in a towering rage. By eight o’clock they were locked in a terrifying, hysterical conflict. This happened every night, or four or five nights a week. Every night at six Bert would come home expecting dinner to be ready, though it never was. Even I, a child, knew it would not be ready, that it could not ever be ready, because ten hours was not nearly long enough to finish cleaning our incredibly dirty house, which had to be accomplished before dinner could be served. I couldn’t understand why he never learned, why he was unable to reconcile himself to a process that could no more be hurried than the setting of the sun or the changing of the seasons.

  My brother, seven years older, was by now in high school and seemed to have a life of his own, apart from the three of us. There was no one on hand to explain to me (even if I could have understood) that my parents had achieved a marital dynamic that worked perfectly for them. Against all appearances, they were not on the verge of breaking up. Chaos and conflict were as welcome to them as peace and harmony might be to another couple. I imagined that any day our family would be torn apart—I even wished for it to be torn apart. In fact, as I much later realized, nothing could have parted them; they were inseparable in their antagonism.

  It was Thelma who set the stage and created the premises for their battles. Bert didn’t care where he lived. He’d have been content to live in the same rooms forever. Thelma, accordingly, was forever agitating to move somewhere that would be “less work.” This was unanswerable, of course. The theory was that if Thelma had “less work” to do, we might be able to live “a normal life” (which is what Bert wanted, wasn’t it?), so we moved every year or so, though naturally none of our new homes was ever “less work,” so there was always cause to move again. Bert got tired of taking The
lma out drinking after their nightly battles, so she took to going out alone and coming home falling-down drunk—a new source of conflict. He gave up drinking entirely; she therefore took up drinking during the day—another new source of conflict. Mother was adaptable; if Bert had taken up sin, she would have taken up religion.

  Surrounded by forces utterly beyond their control, children automatically take up magic.

  Between the endless moving, boozing, housecleaning, and brawling, it seemed to me that we lived in hell.

  Surrounded by forces utterly beyond their control, children automatically take up magic. This is something that doesn’t need to be explained or thought about; it’s as instinctive in humans as nest-building in birds. In its simplest, truest form, magic is performed as a demonstration, to show the universe what’s expected of it. If you want it to rain, for example, you go out and sprinkle things with water. If you want it to stop raining, on the other hand, you make a fire and start drying things out.

  The condition around me was this: Neither one of my parents seemed capable of understanding what the other wanted or needed. Thelma couldn’t seem to understand that “all Bert wanted” was a quiet life—to come home night after night to the same house, to a sober wife, to dinner on the table at six or six-thirty. But Bert was no better in this regard; he couldn’t seem to understand that Thelma was incapable of doing what he wanted; she “needed” to clean the house for ten or twelve hours every day and therefore “couldn’t” have dinner on the table before eight or nine o’clock—or even ten o’clock on especially difficult days, when she might, for example, decide to repaint the bathroom or the kitchen, without neglecting a single one of her other, more usual chores.