Born Naked Read Free Page A

standing!” They were in my room within seconds but arrived too late to see my visitor, who had hurriedly decamped.
    Although my parents assured me it had all been a dream, that bear was as real as anything could be. I can still see him in awesome detail: about seven feet tall, brown-furred, long-clawed, and, except for the rakish cap he wore, truly bear. He startled the hell out of me but I couldn’t have been too frightened because I was content to remain alone in that room not only for the rest of the night but for our remaining time at Bingen.
    I even harboured hopes he might return. This time I would be expecting him and, who knows, we might become friends. But he never came back, and I think I know why. My parents were partially correct. It was a dream all right, but it was the bear’s dream. And I think we scared the bejesus out of him.
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    1 A rectangular wooden frame used in the upper portion of a hive.

 
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    DURING THE SUMMER OF 1923 the apiary, which had always been a losing proposition (we kept bees… not vice versa), was smitten by a pestilence called “foul brood.” The bees perished in their tens of thousands, leaving us without even enough honey to spread on the soda biscuits we could no longer afford.
    The winter following the foul brood disaster was a tough one. Angus sought work and Don Fraser, brother of the ubiquitous Billy, tried to employ him as an insurance salesman.
    â€œIt wasn’t any good,” Angus remembered. “I was too shy, you see. When I saw a likely prospect coming, I’d cross to the other side of the street. But once old Tommy Potts tracked me down. He was eighty-seven, blind in one eye and couldn’t see out of the other, and had halitosis that could knock a horse off its feet at fifty yards. He said he was dying and needed life insurance. I sold him fifty thousand or so dollars’ worth on credit but Don wouldn’t honour the sale.”
    To make things worse, the chimney in Bingen’s cavernous kitchen caught fire and collapsed. We escaped unscathed but had to seek refuge in another decayed structure, which Angus christened the Swamp House because it stank pervasively of rotten wood.
    My mother, most long-suffering of women, was able to endure this except when visitors were expected. Then she would burn quantities of brown paper in the kitchen stove with the chimney damper tightly shut, thereby filling the house with acrid smoke. She admitted that this was exchanging one stink for another but hoped her half-asphyxiated visitors would at least be unaware of the underlying stench of mould which, to her mind, was synonymous with the “stench of poverty.”
    At this juncture some of our little family’s well-wishers came to the rescue. The librarian of the Trenton Public Library, a crotchety spinster who had run her little fiefdom with an autocratic hand for thirty years maintaining her position by threatening to resign if anyone questioned her rule, chose to make this threat once too often. The chairman of the board took her at her word and offered the job to Angus, at the munificent salary of five hundred dollars a year.
    So Angus began the career which was to engross him for the rest of his working days. And we three began to eat regularly. Leaving the Swamp House to the mould and mildew, we took up residence in two upstairs rooms rented from Mrs. White, a railroad worker’s widow whose daughter had been one of my father’s girls in high-school days. This choice did not please my mother. Years later she was to tell me, “He was as charming to that little sniff of a daughter as if she was a princess; and the way she looked at him was enough to make one ill.” Even then I think my mother had begun to suspect she had married a rover.
    My father’s interest in women was surpassed only by his passion for boats, a passion he was determined his son must share. When I was a year old, he began