“Ha!” Said he; “that’s a comfortable reflection. You have done your duty?”
“I have not worn anybody’s life away,” said Peggotty. “I am thankful to think! No Mr. Murdstone, I have not worrited and frightened any sweet creetur to an early grave!”
He eyed her gloomily—remorsefully I thought—for an instant; and said, turning his head towards me but looking at my feet instead of my face:
“We are not likely to encounter soon again;—a source of satisfaction to us both, no doubt, for such meetings can never be agreeable. I do not expect that you, who always rebelled against my just authority, exerted for your benefit and reformation, should owe me any good will now. There is an antipathy between us—”
“An old one, I believe?” I said interrupting him.
The scene ends with Mr. Murdstone continuing to impugn David’s character. Both, however, are mindful of their obligation to behave as gentlemen, and David wonders what constraints he might have shed if he had not felt anxious about what Peggotty, less class-bound than he, might have gone on to say. But in a sense David gets to have it both ways. He behaves as a gentleman, yet between his own cool comments and Peggotty’s more biting sarcasm enough truth gets spoken: Mr. Murdstone is called to account.
In my own life, I never had the chance to reencounter Bow Wow. I was never able to tell him how he had scarred me and afflicted my family. I never experienced the catharsis of showing him I knew the harm he had done us, naming it with accuracy and without fear. So Bow Wow remained the bogeyman of my imagination, a shadow in my psyche. Then one day, a good six or eight years after the death of my mother, I learned that Bow Wow, too, had died. An old California family friend had read a short obituary in the Los Angeles Times. Perhaps it was Bow Wow’s link with my mother that earned him this notice. Or the fact that in his later years, he had become a hanger on—almost a kind of mascot—of the Los Angeles Rams. I calculated he must have died in his seventies and had trouble thinking of him as an old man.
To learn of Bow Wow’s death was a relief. The death meant he could never pop into our lives again to harm or embarrass us, never again send me a card, as he had last done when I married at twenty-six, thirteen years after his exit from our home, addressed to “Princess Wendy Westbrook” and offering the perverse gift of a hundred Hail Marys to be said for me at Beverly Hills All Saints Catholic Church. He could never boast again to the football players he hung out with of his years with Sheilah Graham; never again write to Matthew Bruccoli, the Fitzgerald scholar, about his alleged cache of Scott Fitzgerald papers. Perhaps I could now move a step further away from my still simmering rage. But I was left strangely disquieted at old business left unfinished.
My mother had resolved her history with Bow Wow by cutting him literally out of the story. In our family archives we have a picture from the reception celebrating her wedding to Bow Wow of my mother with Marilyn Monroe, but not a single one of her and Bow Wow, though that means some of the pictures were torn in half. His name was stricken, too. She would refer to him either as “the monster” or as “my unfortunate third husband.” But at the same time she stored him up as material for fiction. Though she never did more than compile a few notes for it, she talked about writing a short story called “Athlete’s Foot,” in which the protagonist dreams of being a great athlete but is thwarted by his small feet (Bow Wow hadn’t been the college football star he had claimed to be—that was just one of his lies.). At the end of the story, my mother planned for this character to redeem himself by dying to save a girl from drowning in the ocean. She thus managed to turn Bow Wow into, if not a hero, at least a comic villain, you might even say something out of Dickens, a blowhard wobbling on small feet, easily toppled. As for me, though I linger with my Dickensian trauma, an experience akin to that of the young boy working in the blacking warehouse, the reversal and shame to which he returns again and again, I have hopes as well of more release from it.
My relationship to David Copperfield has a less ambiguous coda. For a few years in the late 1990s, I taught one course each semester at New York University. One day I saw a notice on a bulletin board in the NYU English department announcing a conference in Sydney, Australia, on The Victorians and Childhood. I thought of my Brooklyn College friend Roni Natov, who is a preeminent scholar in Children’s Studies and also a specialist in the Victorian Novel, my field as well. I detached the poster from the wall and took it to Roni.
“You’ve got to try to do this,” I urged her.
“Yes,” she said, “But you’ve got to come, too.”
The deadline for paper submissions had passed, but we got permission to send in a proposal if we could dispatch it the next day. Overnight we concocted a topic and an abstract. Our paper, “Dickens’s David and Carroll’s Alice: Representations of Victorian Liminality,” would examine reverie in David Copperfield and nightmare in Alice in Wonderland, the two expressions of self we identified as liminal. We posited that the reverie is always seeking to repair the psyche’s sense of loss and the nightmare allows for that loss to be expressed without acknowledging any real wounds to the psyche. The books joined for us in their use of the child and his or her wondrous journey to penetrate the
