So, I stopped writing Larry Peters stories, but I didn’t stop thinking about writing them, and as a result the time I spent in bed before I fell asleep became, for me even more than for most adolescents, a time of guilty pleasures, when my thoughts would turn both to girls and to stories. Since I was already developing the tastes that are today so broad that there is almost no girl or woman in whom I do not see some touch of beauty, almost no book in which I do not find some good idea, some admirable phrase, there were very many girls and very many stories for me to think about, and, of course, the aftermath of these thoughts was guilt, since these were forbidden territories through which I wandered in the dark of my attic bedroom.
Not only did I have to bear all the fearful guilt derived from my awakening interest in sex, but I had a growing load of guilt from my awakening interest in my imagination, and that, I could see, was potentially far more dangerous an obsession. Sex occupies a territory of the mind that has been mapped rather well over the ages; during our personal wanderings there, each of us leaves regions unexplored, but the species has poked into every nook and cranny. The territory of the imagination is another story. The universe of the imagination expands much faster than the physical universe. Even at eleven, I could see that my imagination was, much like the foggy future of the Tars, a place without visible boundaries, perhaps with no boundaries at all, a place where I could get lost if I wasn’t careful. My wanderings there, most often while concocting a Larry Peters story, were thrilling but sometimes frightened me a little. When my father warned me to give up thinking about writing Larry Peters stories, it had an effect on me far worse than the effect that he might have produced by saying, “And you, young man, you cut out that masturbating, understand? If you need something to keep your hands busy, there are plenty of things you can do around the house.”
I did try, though. I tried to stop even thinking about writing Larry Peters stories. I thought about girls instead. They were the only thing that could pull me back from the misty unknown. I tried, very deliberately, to anchor myself to memory—to the remembered image of one girl or another—and thereby keep myself from drifting off into the fog of imagination. It rarely worked for long. I would bring to mind Caroline Thurlow, for example, and try to concentrate on the nape of her neck, on the rounded prominence of the vertebra there, the wisps of hair, and find that soon she and I were crawling through brambles, trying to reach the mountain hideout of the gang that was holding Larry Peters for ransom.
Therefore, my mother’s question, “It’s not another of those Larry Peters stories, is it?” aroused in me some guilty embarrassment.
“No,” I said. “It isn’t that. Honest.”
“Well, then, what is all this, Peter?” she asked.
“It’s supposed to be the manual for the Young Tars,” I said. “I have to get it into shipshape order, because I’m the Scribe now.”
“The Scribe!” said my mother. “Why that’s wonderful! Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Well,” I said, “I wasn’t sure that I wanted to keep the job. I thought it might be too hard for me.”
“Oh, but you’ve decided to keep it now, haven’t you Peter?”
“Well, I—” I began.
“Good for you, Peter,” she said. “I just think it’s wonderful that you’re in the Tars and that you’re a Commodore, and now Scribe!”
“I know,” I said.
“And you look so good in your uniform. Your father said so, just yesterday.” She glanced at my clock. “Well, it wasn’t just yesterday any more,” she said. “It was the day before yesterday. He said, ‘You know, Peter really looks good in a uniform. Some men can really wear a uniform, and some just can’t. You know what I mean, Ella? Some guys, you put them in a janitor’s uniform and they look like the admiral of the fleet, and other guys, you put them in an admiral’s uniform, and they look as if they forgot their brooms.’
“He’s right,” she said. “I always think your father looks especially nice when he goes off to work in a nice clean uniform, the way he has “Bert” stitched over his breast pocket and “Esso” on the back. You know who really looks good in a uniform though? Dudley.”
My mother looked into the distance.
“During the war,” she said, “he looked really—”
She sat without finishing her sentence. She was still. She looked straight ahead. In the quiet, a long time seemed to pass, and I began to feel as tired as I was.
Yawning, I asked her at last, “Really what?”
“Hmmm?” she asked, as if surprised that I was beside her, surprised that I had spoken.
“Dudley looked really what?”
“Oh. Handsome. Dashing. You should get to bed, Peter.”
“What about all these papers?”
“I’ll put them in a neat pile,” she said. “You get into bed.”
In Topical Guide 214, Mark Dorset considers Imagination from this episode.
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