The Cuckoo Clock

Written August 9, 2007

From childhood's hour I have not been

        As others were; I have not seen

        As others saw; I could not bring

        My passions from a common spring.

        From the same source I have not taken

        My sorrow; I could not awaken

        My heart to joy at the same tone;

        And all I loved, I loved alone.

          Edgar Allan Poe. "Alone." 

                                   

            The fact is, he was a homely child – his baby pictures always remind him of unflattering photographs of President Eisenhower in his elder days.  Even as a youngster, when he examined the montage of himself on the wall of his parents’ large, walk-in closet he inwardly cringed at the images of the diapered infant on display in various poses, looking bright and hopeful.  The sight of that pear-shaped head and idiotic grin raised prickles on the back of his neck that accompanied the innate, self-conscious repugnance he felt for the baby.  Later photos fail to reveal any stage in his ontogeny that could be construed as cute.  The plump baby metamorphosed into a gawky kid with veiled eyes, a weak chin, short, white-blond hair and a dour, stoop-headed countenance.  He was the unlovable fourth child of parents who would have been happier had they stopped at three.   His presence was more an imposition than an accentuation at any family event.  He was the one for whom arrangements had to be made – at least until he was about eight years old – then his parents, that is to say his mother, stopped planning altogether.  The father, for his part, had never concerned himself over the boy except to complain to his wife as he leaned back in his chair at the dinette table, the remains of dinner before him while the boy played nearby, “He wet his pants again!  Six years old and he still wets his pants!” 

Dad was an addict, Mom an enabler.  His father reserved his Saturday nights for gregarious activities:  bourbon and jazz, flashing that brilliant smile, and flirting with other men’s wives.  He never let the boy interfere with his plans.  The boy sensed that his father despised him and did his best to stay out of the man’s way.  By the time the older siblings left home his father's Saturday fix expanded to encompass most every evening and his mother always went along, even if she had other desires, for she was spineless in forwarding her own wishes with her husband.  She might be the only one he hated more than the boy. 

To a child of seven, with so few hours logged on this earth, a night alone in a vacated house is an eon of emptiness.  The incessant beat of the clock pervaded the downstairs.  Other than the occasional brief drone of a passing car, the clock’s tick-tock challenged the silence all on its own.   It was a cuckoo clock, a family heirloom, originating in the Schwarzwald, an area along today’s border of Switzerland and Germany.  It accompanied his father’s father across the Atlantic to Cincinnati at the turn of the 20^th century.  The newly ordained minister had little else - the clothes he was wearing, a few dollars in his pocket, and a small trunk containing sundry items; and this clock to remind him of his homeland.  The clock traveled with him to Cincinnati, then Wisconsin and Texas and back to Cincinnati where the still young minister died.  The boy's father brought the clock with him to Camp Hill, Pennsylvania where it found its place on the breakfast room wall. A carved deer head at its peak surveyed the room as the pendulum swung, and the ornate hands of ivory rotated, driven by iron weights shaped like pinecones that hung by fine brass chains beneath the clock face. 

An abandoned seven-year-old boy, alone on a Saturday night, can hardly frame his emotions in words.  Now, four and a half decades later, seated before his laptop computer in a room whose silence is broken only by the tic-toc of the same cuckoo clock, for perhaps the first time, he sorts out the boy’s feelings:  quiet desperation, repressed fear, loneliness and incomprehension.  The still room and ticking clock kindle his memory and he drifts back to 1959, an autumn Saturday night in the house at the corner of 26^th and Lincoln Streets.     

 The boy is slouched across a living room chair losing time, his leg dangles over the arm, rhythmically swinging.  His vacuous gaze takes in a still life of patterned wallpaper, upholstered furniture, oil paintings, a fireplace framed by a painted mantel and ashtrays with one or two remains of his mother’s bad habit.  End tables with inlaid mahogany support matching lamps adapted from cylindrical printer’s coils topped with large, plain, straight-sided, gold shades.  A cacophony of silence prevails, accentuated by the ticking clock, two rooms away.  On the marble-topped coffee table, in front of the long, gold, upholstered sofa sits a small box made of brass, fancy-decorated with blue, silver and gold cloisonne'.  Centered on the top is an oval lid with no visible hinge.  Sliding a small hasp on the front of the box causes the lid to rise up smartly and a small bird, adorned with iridescent feathers of maroon and blue, highlighted with patches of yellow and red, bursts forth and rotates side to side, fluttering tiny wings, singing out a repeated pattern that even now, forty six years later, twitters in his memory without a note missing or out of place.  Its beak opens and closes with each uttered sound.  When its song is finished the bird snaps to its side and returns, just as quickly as it appeared, as the lid slaps shut with a subtle, thick clack that, along with the piece’s utter elegance, betrays the meticulous skill of the artisan that crafted this valuable antique.  The boy slides the hasp again and again until, eventually, the avian performer tires, its song slowing to a dirge, and then stops altogether, lacking the energy to return to its lair.  A brass key, on a string of satin with a thick, purple tassel, fits on an inlaid square peg on the bottom of the box and by turning the key a ratchet within is wound with an audible, metallic whir that rejuvenates the bird to perform once again with renewed vigor.  The boy sets the box back on the table and, with a sigh, sags back into the chair. 

Goebel statuettes and bound volumes on painted, recessed bookshelves repose silently at each end of the room.  He scales the shelf adjacent to the back window and pulls out one of the books.  These might have been the boy’s salvation, but they were ponderous texts and well beyond his level.  The pages smell musty and the printed words appear dry and imposing.  He shuts the book and returns it to its place.  The boy crawls down from the shelf and with a sudden burst of energy he dashes across the living room and into the front foyer, feigns toward the dining room and cuts left past the front stairs and down the short hallway, then sharply to the right past the back stairs and into the breakfast room.  Carrying an imaginary football under his arm and urged on by the cheering crowd, driven wild with excitement at the talent on display, he dodges frustrated tacklers and crosses the goal line into the kitchen end zone.  The band strikes up the fight song and pretty blonde cheerleaders in short, pleated skirts kick their legs high in celebration of his spectacular achievement.  He beams up at the throng but finds only the wooden deer, perched on the clock hanging on a knotty pine wall gazing back at him.  The roar tapers and dwindles to an incessant tick-tock.      

He wanders from room to room, looking at nothing, just thinking, pondering, passing time and enduring emptiness.  He picks up items randomly, brandishing a pencil like a sword, running his fingers along the smooth surfaces of a figurine, his seven-year-old brain collecting data, before unconsciously setting each down as he moves through the house.  He hums tunelessly then descends his voice into a monkey call, swinging his head side to side.  His hand is buried in the front of his trousers as his fingers knit away at his tiny penis.  He squeezes and massages without even taking note of his actions. 

A spark suddenly ignites in his brain.  In a microsecond he has invented a game.    With the glistening optimism that accompanies inspiration he digs tablet paper from his father’s desk.  Eight and a half by eleven-inch sheets are taped together in a two foot by three foot rectangle.  Grid lines are drawn and thereby a football field produced.  Opposing teams are each represented by match packs retrieved from the kitchen drawer.  The exact rules and mechanics were not solid when construction began and the gaps begin to emerge.  As the project nears its uncertain completion, the idea, so verdant at its inception, now looks drab, the results disappointing.  He pushes on.  The paper field is laid flat on the tiled floor of the front hall.  Right hand vs. Left hand the match packs are flicked into collisions on the ersatz gridiron using thumb and index fingers for propulsion.   Yards are gained and lost for a minute, maybe two, until the contest is called on account of tedium.  The inspiration was just one more illusion, devolved into scraps of paper, bits of tape – a waste of materials.  He rolls to his side, then to his back, stares at the ceiling, focusing on nothing, massaging his phallus.   

tic- toc-tic-toc-tic…..

He reposes once again on the living room sofa, staring at the cathode ray screen of a circa 1957 television.  At this stage of its evolution the TV produced a picture in black and white and viewing fare was limited.  If the wind was wrong or unknown forces unappeased, the box produced an array of wavy lines, distorted images and dialog that faded in and out, suffused in static.  A black holster bearing the emblem of a chess knight appears on the screen.  Have Gun Will Travel - a western drama that holds limited interest for a seven-year-old who wants, more than anything, the company of another human being and a world that makes sense.  

“Paladin, Paladin, where do you roam?  

Paladin, Paladin, far, far from home.  

A knight without armor in a savage land…,”

Richard Boone is Paladin, a hired gun with dark, surly features, dressed in black and possessing an even darker disposition – on the whole, unpleasant companionship for the boy who sits and watches nonetheless, and tries, desperately, to enjoy the party to which he has been invited.  Potato chips on a plate with a mixture of ketchup and horseradish for a dipping sauce.  A glass of warm soda set on the coffee table in front of him.  These are the refreshments served at his personal gala.  His imagination vainly spins these as elegant hors d’oeuvres and cocktail, like those his parents might be enjoying at this very moment.   

Darkness stares in at him through large picture windows at each end of the room.  It surrounds him and lays siege, intermittently attacking with suspicious shadows and unexplainable sounds.  The house is too big to monitor with any assurance.  The basement creeps into his consciousness.  He has been down there in daytime, when others were assuringly present upstairs.  In daytime the concrete walls and low ceiling of the back room, behind the furnace, laden with cobwebs and years of coal dust and dirt, dark corners that sustain silver fish and centipedes, can be explored with only a modicum of danger seemingly at hand.  But now, the memories of those daytime investigations re-present themselves in an altogether more malevolent milieu.  The boy sits and ponders, and it becomes distressingly clear in his mind’s eye that that room is down there right now, and he has no possible way of knowing what it might presently harbor.  It seems impossible to sustain the notion that some consciousness doesn’t inhabit that dingy space.  And the very nature of anything that should choose such a home would hardly be other than menacing.  That room is down there, right now.  What lurks within its walls?  To venture through the basement door, just off the kitchen, and down the rickety wooden steps into that realm is not even to be considered.  In the midst of his fearful rumination an unfamiliar tapping is heard.  Was it from outside or in?   Did it emanate from the kitchen?  Could it be the product of some sentient consciousness that has emerged from the basement?  The boy was never in fear of tangible monsters, Godzillas and the like.  Those are easily spotted as artificial constructs and his mind debunks them with little ado.  It is the intangible that fills him with dread.  The unidentifiable woman’s voice that once called to him when he awoke in the night, repeating his name three times, slowly, gently, hauntingly, “Michael… Michael …Michael.” 

The boy is frozen on the sofa.  The realization erupts into his consciousness that his current situation is no mind game.  He really is here, alone, in this place.  Feeling guilt of the same flavor that is generated by the sudden recognition of a wet semicircle of moisture in the crotch of his pants he goes to the kitchen and consults the sheet of paper upon which his mother has written a phone number:  RE7, followed by four digits.  He could dial it for assurance.  Perhaps his mother would recognize the desperate nature of the situation and share his concern.  Perhaps, as is more likely, she would disparage his fears, respond to his entreaties with impatient assurances that his demons are only in his head.  There is no threat, no danger. 

The deer head maintains its vigil.  The pendulum swings, the gears click, the iron weights descend with incomprehensible progress.  

tic-toc-tic-toc-tic ….