Fathers and Demons

Like a lot of East Coast liberals I was raised what I like to call PBS, Protestant But Secular. That is, my family never went to church, but if we had it would have been with the Congregationalists or the Unitarians. At one time, I am told, my parents were pillars of the church; my father even graduated from Harvard Divinity School. But one thing led to another, and by the time I was born, the Kenowers’ church-going days were done.

Things change, however, and if they change enough you sometimes end up back where you started. Shortly after my father married his fourth wife, he had a spiritual awakening, and before long he was driving to Barrington, Rhode Island every Sunday to attend Barrington Presbyterian. This was less of a seismic shake-up than one might imagine. In between losing and finding God, my father was always searching for the book, the philosophy, the way that would guide him through the uncertain waters of life. It only made sense that he should eventually return to the first and maybe greatest self-help book of them all, The Bible.

At this same time, my younger brother, John, and I had begun a great adventure of our own. Having dreamed all our childhood of fame, we decided at the ages of 23 and 21 that it was time to get on with the business of achieving the sort of incredible artistic success of which all our enemies would be jealous. To that end, we had written, and with much diligence and a little luck, had managed to find venues in and around Providence to perform a two-man comedy review. It was hard work, we were young, we still had our day jobs, and theater, especially small theater, especially small theater in Rhode Island, is not the quickest way to “the top.”

Still, we were doing it. We started with the proverbial nothing, just an idea, and in a year we were performing to audiences of laughing strangers. I said to my brother once, “If I had known at the beginning what was actually going to be required to do this, I don’t know if I ever would have started.” Fortunately, I didn’t know. All I did know, which is all one ever gets to know, was that I was in one place and wanted to get to another place. We called our show From Here to There.

That summer my father was invited to deliver a Sunday sermon to his congregation, and my brother and I decided to attend. The worshipers at Barrington Presbyterian were a fairly conservative bunch, though not in any bible-thumping kind of way. Rather they were uniformly white, tended to be 40 and older (with the emphasis on the older), the men drank scotch and the women drank Chablis, they liked to sail, belonged, if possible, to a country club, and by and large went to church because, firstly, that’s what you did; secondly, because it was a pleasant way to spend a Sunday morning; and thirdly, to cover their bases, because if this stuff wasn’t all clap-trap they were not the sort who got turned away at gates, be they pearly or otherwise.

So, naturally, for his sermon’s topic, my father chose demons.

My father had always been rather socially tone deaf. Trips to the bank or a restaurant with him often resulted in some odd exchange with a puzzled teller or waitress—he was always trying a little too hard, talking a little too loud, asking questions that were just a little too personal. I think the world of strangers at times must have seemed as disorienting as a hall of mirrors to him, but he struggled through as best he could, and learned over the years to endure the awkward silences.

And so—the sermon. Demons, it turns out, were other people. Not all of them, but some, and the way you knew for sure that they were demons was if they made you feel bad. He discussed the pragmatic uses of exorcism. And then, to be sure these polite, scotch-sipping Baringtonians who were waiting to get back to their rose bushes and tee times understood just what a demon sounded like, my father imitated one. There on the pulpit, he raised his hands up in two claws, and rasped a wicked feline hissing snarl into the microphone.

Of all the awkward silences I’d heard echoed back to my father in department stores and post offices, none echoed longer or louder than after he hissed across the church like a demon. And yet, in his own strange way, my dad was trying to help the congregation across the divide that everyone must eventually find the wherewithal to navigate, a divide that can seem quite strewn with dangers, snares, and yes, on very dark nights, maybe even demons.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t working, and the hiss was merely the worst of it. The crowd fussed and coughed and checked their watches. And I, as son and actor, thought how I wasn’t my father, and how I would never make such a mistake, and how I had gotten good reviews, and how once, as my brother and I took our final bows, an old man in the front row had clapped and clapped and could be heard above all the other clapping saying, “Yes! Yes! Yes!” I would become famous, and I would be fine.

After the service, my dad wanted us by his side while he stood at the doors of the church and was showered in gratitude and praise, and so John and I got to watch as one by one the congregants tried to think of something polite to say to our father. It was all very familiar to me. I looked at my shoe tops and thought how no one in our family was ever a success. Success was the heaven toward which all ambitions strove, a lovely mountaintop where you got to rest at last secure in the certainty of achievement.

It always sounded like a lovely place, especially compared to the flames of failure, that unmarked grave into which all bad ideas, bad jobs, and bad marriages eventually disappear. Somewhere, I knew, there was a path that led from the idea to the fruition, from the desire to the experience. But where, I wondered, and how did you ever know for sure if you were on it? I’m sure the sermon had seemed like a good idea to my father at the time he wrote it.

Once the awkward procession was over, we learned that none other than Kenny Walhberg was downstairs in the “Playroom.” Kenny had been a friend of my family’s growing up, and the closest thing to a successful artist our mom and dad had ever known. He had run the Rhode Island Puppet Workshop, which toured around the state to schools and fairs and wherever else he could, putting on puppet shows for children and “children at heart.” He was like our own Jim Henson. Whenever he performed in my school I felt special because he would come up to me afterward and say hello.

Kenny, my brother and I were told, wanted to see us. This would be good, I decided. The acrid taste of failure, albeit my father’s, still sat on palate. I had not seen Kenny since I was a boy, and now, all grown up with a show of my own, we could talk shop, receive his professional blessing, and I could feel certain of my future once again.

John and I found him in a small room in the church’s basement, picking up abandoned toys now that the tots had rejoined their parents. Kenny didn’t look so good. He had put on weight, his mustache, which I remembered as a happy, bushy caterpillar, looked heavy and droopy under his nose, and his signature mop of curly brown hair, which had once seemed so wild and interesting, now merely appeared in need of a trim.

John and I skipped quickly over my father’s sermon and got right down to how great our show was doing. We told him about the theaters where we’d performed, about the good reviews we’d gotten, about our talented piano player and the lighting manager we’d just picked up.

Kenny nodded and picked up more toys.

“So you making any money at it?”

“Money? Not much yet,” I began defensively. “But we’re going to try and do the colleges, you know—maybe take it to Boston.”

“Yeah? Well, it’s real hard. I mean—there’s just very little money in it. I did it, and did it, and did it for fifteen years. And I tried everything, believe me: Schools, colleges, fairs—everything. But there was never any money in it. Maybe you get a grant here or there or whatever. It’s never enough. I finally had to give it up. It’s just so hard. It’s great to do it and everything—I mean it’s satisfying or whatever—but there’s just no money in it at all.”

We got out of the church as quickly as possible. Before we were off the front steps my brother and I were already reminding each other how we’d never much cared for the Puppet Workshop, that it had been a rinky-dink operation, that there was a big difference between puppets and theater, and that we had no intention of staying in Rhode Island.

All of this seemed true, yet it couldn’t settle the matter completely. As we pulled away, and as we tried to find one more difference between the Kenower brothers and Kenny Walhberg, the church bell called out the hour behind us, wishing all the congregants well for the rest of their Sunday. It was a sweet sounding bell, so full of hope. Just the sort of bell you’d want ringing to begin a wedding or end a funeral.

Alone At Last

I went to summer camp exactly once as a boy—between sixth and seventh grade—and then only because my best friend Palmer had extolled the boyhood paradise that was Camp Fuller By the Sea. Palmer painted a vivid picture filled with BB guns and bows and arrows, as well as swimming, Capture the Flag, and canoes. It sounded like Pinocchio’s Boy Island, but without the hassle of turning into a donkey. I pestered my poor mother until she agreed to pay what I’m sure was a budget-killing sum on her secretary’s salary to send me to Camp Fuller for two weeks.

I spent an entire school year anticipating the non-stop fun that would be life at camp. I had decided that if there was anything my life needed more of, it was fun. It wasn’t that my day-to-day life lacked fun—it had its normal childhood dose—but I was nagged by the feeling that something was lacking, and I complained often of being bored. Fun seemed a natural remedy for boredom, and yet I frequently found myself drawn—against the better instincts of a fun-seeker—to the quiet corners of my house and backyard.

I liked to be alone. Not all the time, but often. Life’s hustle-bustle was all very well and good, but until I was alone, I didn’t feel complete. Or very nearly complete, anyway, for even then something was still lacking, and so I would turn to my imagination to fill in what seemed so stubbornly absent. Someday, however, I was certain that what I was always imagining would become real, and then I would never again have to be alone to feel whole.

And so off to camp I went where there was company a-plenty. Boys, boys, boys. Boys everywhere being boys. As advertised I got all the swimming, BB gun shooting, canoe paddling and Capture the Flag playing I could stomach, and always, always, always with lots of other boys. Boys to the left and right. Boys above me when I slept; boys beside me when I ate. I lived in a tent with eight or ten other boys where farting was encouraged and hygiene optional. I could have lived without the farting, but I was not great fan of showers and I liked shooting BB guns and Capture the Flag.

The problem with Camp Fuller by the Sea was you were never allowed to be alone. This was no accident. Camp Fuller was conceived, built, and run to keep boys busy and active. If given the option, what normal boy, Camp Fuller’s founders must have wondered, wanted to be alone? Where was the fun in that? I understood the reasoning, but it didn’t help the problem. No sooner would I sit out on the steps of my tent and turn my mind inward then some counselor was in my ear asking me what I wanted to do next. “Nothing” was not an acceptable answer, just as “nowhere” was not an acceptable direction when asked exactly where I was headed by myself in between basketball and archery. Once during a massive game of hide-and-seek I discovered a secluded spot where I sat and sat far longer than any game could have reasonably lasted. There I drank myself full of thought. Yet like all my time alone, my solitude was flavored by the distant fires of other homes—I may have been on an island, but I had a boat, and I knew how to reach the mainland.

Then one moonless night the boys from my tent were brought to a small clearing in the woods where a campfire was burning. There by firelight our counselor told us a story about the Granger House, a derelict home that stood like a vacant sentry at the head of the road that led to Camp Fuller. We’d all driven past the Granger House on our way to camp, and even in the day-light the leaning frame, the shattered windows, and the rusted gate gave it a haunted look—it wasn’t just empty, it was abandoned, and the house seemed to know it and resent it.

The house had once belonged to Mr. Granger, a man who had lived alone at the edge of the camp for sixty years. No one ever saw him leave, but occasionally, if the light was right, you would see him standing in a window, and every Saturday evening he could be heard chopping wood behind the house. He must have been very strong, because he chopped wood once a week for sixty years. Chop, chop, chop. You could hear the chopping if you wandered by at the right hour. Chop, chop, chop.

And then one day—he was gone. Just gone. No chopping, no figure in the window. Nothing. A year past, and nothing. Two years. Still nothing. In the summer of the third year, three boys from Camp Fuller decided to investigate. They crept off from their tents—why, it was our tent, in fact! Tent three. The counselor had only just remembered this detail. In any case, they crept off alone one night and made their way by flashlight down the road and to the house. The door was locked, but with some effort they forced it open.

They shone their lights around the great entry room. Cobwebs everywhere, furniture overturned, broken lamps, fallen paintings. “Hey,” said one. “I just realized—it’s Saturday. Mr. Granger’s chopping day.” A chill silence settled over them. “I say we split up,” said the same boy. The other two balked at first, but the dare had been laid, and no one wanted to be called chicken, and so they dispersed. But one boy, the youngest of the three, had a funny feeling. The house had never felt entirely empty to him. Once the other two were out of sight, he slipped out-side.

Good thing. As soon as he reached the road, he heard a scream from inside the house. He called his friends’ names. Nothing. Then there was another scream. He called their names once more. Again nothing. They had to be joking, he thought. This was just some prank. They were always pulling pranks. That was when from somewhere behind the house he heard it—chop, chop, chop. He ran back to camp. The other two boys were never seen again.

His story concluded, the counselor asked us if we knew what day it was. Saturday, we said. He then gathered us up and told us it was time to take a walk. I shared a look with the other boys from tent three, but no, he couldn’t possibly be taking us . . . By the time we reached the road that led from the camp to the Granger House, we knew in fact he could. As I said, there was no moon, and some high summer clouds had even blacked out the stars. Walking on a for-ested road, far from the street lamps and headlights, the night was a shade of black a city boy like myself could only find locked in a closet with a winter coat over his head. When we reached the house, the Counselor swept his flashlight’s beam over the its sagging and derelict frame—it was perfectly still and perfectly dark.

“Okay. In we go.”

We didn’t protest. We couldn’t. On the road we had been told about how we were get-ting older, how boyhood as we knew it would soon be coming to an end, and that the difference between boys and men was who was afraid and who was not. We entered the house. In the company of the other boys and the counselor and his flashlight it wasn’t so bad. It was an old house with broken windows and doors off their hinges. But then the counselor led us from room to room, and at each room, he left one boy by himself. I was left in the third. I could hear the counselor depositing the other boys in their rooms, and then his solitary footsteps, and then the front door close, and then nothing.

I was alone. I could hear my heart beating as I told myself it was just a story he had made up and that he would never put us in harms way. The silence did not last long, however—there was a cough here, a sniff there, and then soon I heard other boys chattering between rooms. In a moment, the counselor returned.

“You weren’t supposed to talk to each other,” he admonished once we were outside. He shook his head gravely. “Okay,” he said. “I didn’t want to do this. Kenower. Come here.”

He pulled a candle from his pocket and lit it with his cigarette lighter and handed it to me. “In you go. I’ll give a shout when you can come out again.”

I took the candle and faced the house. The counselor’s flashlight illuminated the door. Cupping the flame with my hand, I walked steadily away from the others and up the steps and into the house. “Close the door,” called the counselor. I did. For a moment the flashlight’s beam lit the window, and then the outside world went black.

My small candle was little use against the depth of night, but there was nowhere else to look; beyond it was a void. I was here, I knew, to choose not to believe in ghost stories, but that seemed a feeble threat. The darkness, the house, the candle—these were all too familiar to my solitary self. The distant company of others is always a vague comfort in the solitude of imagi-nation. Just as in sleeping dreams, imagination always begets a question, a question composed just for you, and so you turn and turn to it, the way you must when someone calls your name, until life pulls you back to her circus, and you leave off, knowing you will hear your name again and wondering if perhaps that’s enough and all one ever gets. Unless, of course, you decide one day to not just turn but to actually walk towards what you have heard—the circus will be no comfort then, for it was only your name you heard in the darkness.

Eventually the counselor gave the call, and I found my way to the front door, fumbling against the blackness, and then stepped outside. The face of the next camper appeared before me, and I handed him the candle.

One by one they went in after me, and we stood and watched their tiny flame consumed by the house. Alone they entered, and alone they reemerged, relieved and unharmed. After-wards, there was much congratulating and then a short and happy walk home. It was good to be alive. Of that we were all certain.