Stealing Pears

Photo by Nick Saltmarsh

When I was thirteen, in 1968, I found a paperback called Campus Traders, waterlogged, wrinkled, splayed open and facedown in the vines near Mill River in East Rock Park in New Haven, Connecticut. I’d wandered past my neighborhood of steady Victorian houses and hundred-year-old elms, by the bright blue mailbox on the corner of Cold Spring Street and the spot where you could see Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument, up the Giant Steps at the top of East Rock. I’d walked through a sloping section of chestnut trees and silver maples, beyond the abandoned jungle gym with its carousel horsehead swing, past a chain-link fence and around tar-covered tennis courts. Then I entered a part of the city park I’d promised my mother I would never go into—over to the old iron footbridge, behind a cliff and down a path and onto the banks of the murky Mill River. Hollyhocks and morning glory looped around willows and hemlock down there, and the stump on the side of the path by the river, where I sat to read the book I’d found, was a little bit muddy. I knew there had been attacks here sometimes, men exposing themselves or robbing people who strayed here. I associated this area and the tramps who I, wrongly, thought lived here with the regicide judges, Goffe and Whalley, who, my mother told me, had hidden from King Charles I in Judges’ Cave, up beyond Whitney Avenue in West Rock Park.

Campus Traders seemed to be about two couples, one of the men a full professor, the other a younger assistant professor. The older professor had a wife whose body he thought of as freakish because, though she was old—thirty or so—she kept it in unrealistically good shape with exercise and training. She wore a lot of see-through yellow things when she walked through the kitchen; they showed off her buttocks, and that had started to bother him. He wanted someone young, with a real, unexercised body, and so, with some trepidation, he had a talk with the assistant professor, who had a lovely young wife.

“Enjoying the book?” A stranger stood on the path in front of me, hands in his pockets, smiling. I wondered if maybe the book was his, because he seemed to have a sense of what was in it.

“Oh, yes!” I said, without thinking what my answer might say about me. “I like it a lot!”

Then I remembered that I was in a dangerous part of the park, which suddenly seemed a bit chilly. I pulled my sweater close around my shoulders. There were dirty pieces of paper and bottle caps in the river, I saw now. As soon as the man had left, I got up, dusted myself off and hurried home.

I brought the book with me.

Because by thirteen I had already been a character in a book myself— captured, on page 131 of my father’s book The Fifteenth Ward and the Great Society, as an example of a white girl adjusting to the black students being bused to her school—I felt a special kinship with the characters in books I read. Because I had been a character and could reasonably expect to become one again, I empathized with the characters I met in books, sorry for the poverty of their authors’ representations. At the same time, I felt proud that I had been placed between my father’s pages. I had seen my father’s book on my science teacher’s shelf when she invited our eighth grade class to her house; I felt specially known because she’d read his thoughts about the impact of the Great Society programs—urban renewal, scattered housing, school desegregation—on our city and because she’d read that section in which my father’s “daughter Cynthia” sat on the edge of her bed thinking about the black kids who were coming to her school. I’d seen notes written...