There was other loss as well. Just as Peggotty leaves Davy to marry her persistent suitor, Mr. Barkis, so, too, our Stella went away to marry. One day, walking me the six blocks to my elementary school as she did every morning, she broke the news with a final hug that she would be gone when I got home that afternoon. Stella left us to marry Al, an alfalfa farmer in Thousand Oaks. I visited her for a weekend in her new home, a one-story concrete structure amid flat fields of alfalfa stretching over the desert landscape towards the distant blue mountains. As I lay there in a narrow bed at night, a lugubrious train whistle cut through the night air. When I got home and was sullen, my mother got mad at me and said I should have stayed with Stella.
My battle against Bow Wow stands as one of my life’s defining experiences. Its imprint doesn’t fade, and as a reader and rereader of Victorian fiction, in which so many children do battle with adult tyrants, I continue to find its traces. I take note, for example, when Jane Eyre, the retrospective narrator, reflects about her young self’s defiance of her unkind aunt, Mrs. Reed: “A child cannot quarrel with its elders, as I had done—cannot give its furious feelings uncontrolled play, as I had given mine—without experiencing afterwards the pang of remorse and the chill of reaction.” And I think about the cost of my own defiance. I opposed Bow Wow, just as Jane Eyre does the Reeds, stripping away their false faces, naming them as bad people. I ought to claim kinship with passionate, outspoken Jane Eyre more than with passive David Copperfield. It’s odd that I don’t; I was certainly as reckless as she. When Bow Wow kicked our dog Tony, when he caught him chewing one of his shoes—he, Bow Wow, was the only person in our house ever to mistreat a dog—I openly challenged the tyrant. “You can’t kick Tony,” I said, placing myself between my angry stepfather and the cowering animal. My mother, who was watching, later said she’d been afraid in that moment that Bow Wow would kick me. But he didn’t. It was one of the unspoken rules of the house that he mustn’t lay a hand on me or my brother, though once when he found me reading in bed after I was supposed to have the light out, he did come in and cuff me on the head. I wonder on which of my cherished nineteenth-century novels I was shining my flashlight under the covers. David Copperfield? Bleak House? Vanity Fair? Jane Eyre? Wuthering Heights? By the end of sixth grade, I had devoured all of these. By eighth grade I was on to the Russians. War and Peace. Crime and Punishment. The Idiot.
The price of being Bow Wow’s enemy was that I cut off the possibility of being his friend. There is a passage in David Copperfield that I find particularly poignant. David reflects on how easy it would have been for Mr. Murdstone to win his allegiance:
God help me, I might have been improved for my whole life, I might have been made another creature, perhaps, for life, by a kind word at that season. A word of encouragement or explanation, of pity for my childhood ignorance, of welcome home, of reassurance to me that it was home, might have made me dutiful to him in my heart henceforth . . . and might have made me respect instead of hate him.
The one day I can remember Bow Wow’s being nice to me, I melted instantly. My younger brother, Robert, occupied the position of Bow Wow’s favorite, but that day, because of some small transgression, Robert had offended him. My mother and Bow Wow used to drive separate cars from Malibu Beach, where we rented a beach house, to our regular home in Beverly Hills. Normally Robert would have gone with Bow Wow and I with our mother, but for once Bow Wow asked me to accompany him. I was flattered, even thrilled, to be preferred. Bow Wow could be charming, and he exercised the full weight of that charm, joking with me and drawing me out, as the metallic blue Chrysler station wagon—the car my mother had received as a gift because Chrysler was the sponsor of The Sheilah Graham Show—wound along the Pacific Coast Highway. By the time we turned off Sunset Boulevard onto our street, North Maple Drive, I was his. But only for a day. I quickly resumed my role as his enemy. It was a role, however, that left me feeling unlovely, even unlovable.
Many years later, in Paris where my grown son, Sean, had settled, I went with him, a young zestful father, and his two-year-old daughter, Louise, to a little neighborhood playground that had a slide. Sean made feints at scampering up the slide while Louise swept down it. “Papa! Papa!” she cried in glee, as she stood at the top of the slide preparing to reenact the ritual. That’s what I had missed, I thought to myself. Being a father’s daughter. My mother might have married anyone, and she married Bow Wow, an uncouth, uneducated man who hated me and whom I hated. Bow Wow, of course, did not read nineteenth-century novels, though he did teach me to recite in chronological order the list of presidents of the United States—something I can do to this day.
Just as David Copperfield is sent away to school at Salem House, I was sent to Rosemary Hall in Greenwich, Connecticut. The idea of my going to boarding school had formed when Bow Wow was still with us. It was a way for my mother to get me out of harm’s way at home and also to see me advance
