The Only Child at the Party by Anthony Mohr
The theme for our junior year English class that week was “man alone.” (It was 1963; the term “man” included women.)
Among other stories, Mr. Quinlan had assigned Leonid Andreyev’s “The Little Angel,” a tale about a thirteen-year-old boy at a Christmas party who, though surrounded by “smart, pretty children,” became so “morose and gloomy” that he crept into a corner behind the piano, where he sat “unconsciously crumpling to pieces in his pocket the last of the cigarettes…” The brightly lit room, the chattering guests, the platter of sweets—nothing helped the boy, Mr. Quinlan said. “He was alone.”
I raised my hand and blurted out, “But he’s not alone. He’s at a party.”
Bobby shifted in his seat. He never would have said that. He knew what Mr. Quinlan was driving at—in Andreyev’s words, “that bottomless abyss which separates man from man and makes him so lonely, unhappy, and weak.” Our class genius, Bobby was a tad shorter than most of us but made up for it with disarming charm and a flowing voice that won medals in debate and original oratory.
Mr. Quinlan was the best English teacher at Beverly Hills High School that year. Twenty-eight years old, with tortoise-shell glasses and diction as crisp as President Kennedy’s. Like JFK, Mr. Quinlan projected an intellectual style via potent, complete sentences. Paragraphs, actually.
Mr. Quinlan aimed his deadeye stare at me and dismissed my remark. “You can be alone. Even among your friends. As alone as you will be when you die.”
At least five voices chorused, “Huh?” One belonged to Larry. Tan with a wide smile, he excelled in athletics and singing.
Mr. Quinlan gestured—a sweep of his arm across our honors class full of students he knew had been friends for years. With force he said, “There can be twenty-seven people holding hands in a circle, but you die alone.”
His statement floated across Room 300, the only third-story classroom in the school because it occupied our Norman-style watchtower, which meant we were closer to heaven at that moment than any other students at Beverly High. The windows were open, overlooking the student parking lot and, beyond a fence, the back lot of Twentieth Century Fox. Since it was a warm day and since the room had windows on three sides, a pleasant breeze sailed in and moved, no more than an inch or two, the American flag that hung by the blackboard. Birds sang in the trees. Most of the girls wore sleeveless tops. The boys’ shirts were freshly pressed. Nobody whispered or passed notes. There were no clouds for miles. The big hand on the wall clock hitched momentarily before jerking forward by a minute to 3:12, the end of the school day.
Bobby, David, Larry, Richard, and I sprang away the moment the bell rang, down the stairs, and through the pop of Hi’s from kids in the hall. We stopped at our lockers. Then it was over to the mimeograph machine in the student body office to run off a flyer for an upcoming dance. I don’t recall what we talked about, but it had nothing to do with death. Funerals were as foreign as Fez. Our parents would live forever. We’d never lost one. Nor a sibling (Bobby, David, Larry, and Richard had sisters), nor a friend, nor a teacher. Our landscape brimmed with life, quite a change from my year of living in Sweden. I was seven then. Europe was littered with so many graves and tombs that I worried my parents would die any moment.
“We’re going to live a long time,” my father told me, his only child, one dark winter afternoon in Sweden. He was forty when he held my hand and made that promise.
After dinner, following my algebra, history, and French homework, I started Mr. Quinlan’s assignment. He’d told us to compare and contrast—how often did we do that in school?—several short stories, including “The Little Angel” and Maxim Gorky’s “In the Steppe.” “Relate them to our man alone theme,” he said. “Bring in your own experience.”
On my desk sat a heavy, gray typewriter with its red Royal label in the center, between the tab set and tab clear buttons. I rolled a blank sheet of Corrasable Bond through the carriage. I enjoyed each whack of the keys and dings from the carriage each time I hit the return lever, sounds that furnished a sense of progress which, tonight, I didn’t feel. I was used to doing my homework alone, but it took longer than usual to begin this paper.
Eventually I typed, “In a world of billions, man is alone,” and swaddled the next sentence with adjectives and adverbs. “Whether he is with an intimate friend or in a raging mob, he is primarily a lonely creature.” Three weeks from now Mr. Quinlan would circle the words “alone” and “lonely” and write in the margin, “The same?”
After going downstairs to fetch a 7UP, I pressed on. “‘In the Steppe’ gives the image of three brutes traipsing through a vast endless plain.” I paused before adding, “On the broad earth, they are alone.” Next, a plodding sentence: “The lonely experience in the solitude of a steppe is the same as is felt in a joyous Christmas party.”
Somewhere around 1 a.m. came the whine of the snub-nosed truck that served as a street sweeper. As always, I looked out the window. Its yellow beams of light turned the vehicle into an alien pod and made me feel as removed from the planet as those “three brutes” on the steppe.
Back at my typewriter, I added more teenage prose: “In ‘The Little Angel,’ we see the crowd of youngsters gayly [sic] surrounding a Christmas tree, but Sashka, the main character, sulks. He feels as if he is an unwanted, foreign intruder. Even while the boy is in this mass of humanity, he feels loneliness.”
I got up and paced the hall, pausing at the off-white bedroom door near the end. Behind it slept my mother and stepfather. She and Stan married in December 1958. I was eleven then. In 1994, after thirty-six years, my mother’s death would do them part. But that night I didn’t think of death. Loss had not played a role in the stories Mr. Quinlan assigned. What rolled through my mind was Sashka, alone at his Christmas party.
Alone? At a Christmas party? There was only one place for Bobby, David, Larry, Richard, and me to be on December 24, 1963, and all the December 24ths that came before and after—Larry’s living room for tree-trimming with his family. It didn’t matter that, like almost everyone else in school, including me, Larry was Jewish. Each year the evening became the Beverly Hills version of Farmer Gray’s party in Leroy Anderson’s “Sleigh Ride,” with classmates and parents dropping by to drink eggnog, eat the homemade cookies Larry’s mother served, give each other a hug, and hang tinsel on the tree next to the baby grand piano. Larry’s older sister glided by, eggnog in hand, a smile for Larry and then one of the guests. A log popped in the fireplace. Flames reflected off the glass ornaments. Behind the tree a rectangular bay window looked out onto the street. Bobby said something to his sister that made her laugh.
Shortly after I hung a straw elf on Larry’s Christmas tree, Richard’s sister said the weather might turn warm before New Year’s. If so, Richard promised to invite us to play Marco Polo in his swimming pool. I loved that game, even when I was “it” and flailed through the water in search of someone to tag.
Standing near the baby grand piano, Bobby, David, Larry, and Richard reminisced their way back to 1953. David, Larry, and Richard had grown up on the same street, Bedford Drive; Bobby, one block over on Peck Drive. They’d been friends since the third grade. One of them mentioned The Four Horsemen, a club they’d formed.
A few minutes later I walked into the dining room and gathered sweets from a wooden table that groaned with food. The aroma of coffee from the urn blended with the odor of chocolate mousse. All around me were guests talking about nothing.
I crossed the foyer to a room large enough for one easy chair, a small couch, and a television on a stand against the far wall. A door led to a powder room. Three adults scrunched on the couch while others crowded in, including David. He had the wiry build of a long-distance runner, which he was. Somebody asked him about the latest French test.
“I got an A. Gift from the gods, really,” David said with an endearing look. He pronounced the word “really” as “rilly.”
“I’m not surprised,” said Richard. “You always study with sedulous care.”
I was there when Richard’s grandmother gave him a dictionary for his twelfth birthday. “Thank you,” he said. “This will serve me through college.” He relished reading it.
“Are your classes okay?” Larry’s mother asked me. She had the sweet disposition of a favorite aunt. Also her question was more than just polite. Had anything at school not been okay, she could do something about it. Larry’s father had headed the Board of Education for so long that the local press called him a “veteran member.” Who’d want to hide in a corner during this party? I felt connected and protected, safe. Larry and his family were the antidote to the lonely crowd.
In the foyer under the chandelier, next to the curved staircase that led to the bedrooms, a knot of classmates surrounded Larry as he narrated his drive home from somewhere. A red signal had been about to turn green—he could see that the cross traffic had the yellow light—and so he didn’t slow down. But as he neared the intersection, the yellow light failed to change. Larry held out his hand, palm facing down, as he said, “It hung there another moment,” and then he laughed. Then everyone laughed. We knew what he was talking about, and because driving was still new to us, we were giddy, vicariously enjoying Larry’s effort to time the signal.
Larry’s father walked over. He had a deep voice, full of authority. I think he’d overheard his son’s story and, since his son had not cracked up the car, found it amusing. Larry’s father was a lean, regal man, pleasant to all.
Thirty-two days earlier John Fitzgerald Kennedy had been killed, but we didn’t dwell on him. I can’t recall if we’d moved on or were forcing ourselves to forget. For me, a little of both. I know someone mentioned him because it made me contrast Mr. Quinlan’s image of twenty-seven people holding hands in a circle with the President and his wife beside him, holding whatever part of him she could. As quickly as the image reached my mind, it disappeared. Tonight nobody would die. Maybe that was fortuitous—one of Mr. Quinlan’s favorite adjectives.
Eleven o’clock. I may have been the last person to leave the party, after downing a final cookie. As he shook my hand, Larry said, “Right out that door, sweetheart,” a line from “Non Skeddo Flies Again,” a Lenny Bruce routine. It was one of several quips Larry and I tossed when we passed each other in the halls at school.
Each tap of my shoes echoed across the walkway that ran from the door across the patio. Before shutting the front gate, I gave a backward glance at Larry’s house, with its Spanish tiled roof and a balcony—probably off the master bedroom—flanked by four wooden columns.
The party had made me feel so content that I ignored the damp chill that settled in with no moon or stars above the tops of the plane trees. I didn’t walk fast; I was in no danger. Nobody was out. A police car rolled by, a frequent occurrence in Beverly Hills. My home was two blocks away, a trip that took me by seventeen houses, all different—colonials, traditionals, many with Spanish tile roofs. All with coiffed front lawns.
Midway down McCarty Drive, my street, a red-brick path led to our front door, past the rosebushes my mother tended with “sedulous” care.
All was calm—no sound from my mother and stepfather. It was too late for them to hold my hand and kiss me goodnight. They were sleeping. Maybe my father was too—in his Hollywood rental with his second wife. Or somewhere else with his new lover.
I hung my sport coat and tie in my bedroom closet where, inside, dangled a calendar, courtesy of the high school. I’d noted Larry’s party but nothing in the space for New Year’s Eve.
One a.m. The street sweeper hissed by. I watched until it left my sight and the sound drained away. That beast never failed to darken my mood.
I crawled into bed. I turned out the light. An owl hooted. The house felt empty, as if nobody slept in the next room. It may have been Christmas Eve—technically Christmas morning—but the glow from Larry’s party had dissipated, replaced by the cavity of being alone.
In a few hours Stan’s two children would arrive. He must have fought hard for that clause in the custody agreement. We’d open presents and act cheery. All I needed was a few hours’ sleep before jumping into that pleasure. But I couldn’t sleep; I was alone. And lonely. I thought of my mother beside her husband. And my father, wherever he was.
Alone and lonely. Were they the same? Emily Dickinson called loneliness “the horror not to be surveyed.” Why was that? My mother and stepfather were no more than ten feet away, on the other side of my bedroom wall, but the way I felt, they might as well have been on Mars.
These thoughts hadn’t made it into my English paper. Instead of weaving them in, I’d clung to the two short stories Mr. Quinlan selected for us, parroting their themes but digging no further, failing to understand the reasons for the abyss without a bottom. In the end I wrote, “The authors are dubious; all they can conclude is that man is alone in the world and in the mob.” Observing that my paper contained “some good ideas” but failed to “deal with all the implications,” Mr. Quinlan gave me a B+. He graded generously.
Anthony J. Mohr’s work has appeared in, among other places, Cleaver, DIAGRAM, Hippocampus Magazine, North Dakota Quarterly, Superstition Review, and ZYZZYVA. His memoir, Every Other Weekend—Coming of Age With Two Different Dads (Koehler Books), was published in February 2023. He is a 2021 Fellow of Harvard’s Advanced Leadership Initiative.
22 June 2023
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