It may very well have been Brother Quinn who took me aside one spring afternoon when I balked at playing left field, but, if not, it was a colleague similarly pacific. Somehow, whoever it was made it clear that I was not to be punished for balking. While the rest of the boys went on with their softball game, we withdrew to a set of swings and discussed the matter with therapeutic patience. All I can think of now is a Temptation of Christ in reverse, with Jesus quietly laying out all the advantages of being a team player — the friendliness of my peers, the assurance of being on the right track, even the health benefits — to a mulish Satan, determined that under no circumstances would I agree stand up on the field with a glove and pretend to pay attention to the game. I had already experimented, not at Iona but at a summer day camp years before, with turning my back on the action and gazing vacantly at the flora, the fauna, and the passing cars, but I had found that this trial led to nothing but error. The best way to win was not to begin. The dialogue on the swings, both of us gently swinging back and forth with our feet on the ground, as if were in rocking chairs on a veranda, was almost unearthly, for I could not really believe that at some point I would not be told to stand up and bend over. But my interlocutor kept his word. I must have convinced him that I had absolutely no use for baseball or any other team sport, and that there was no anxiety about personal inadequacy at the bottom of my resistance.

When I was taken out of Iona Grammar two years later and sent to another school, it was for different reasons. I came into conflict — perhaps it was just contact — with an inexperienced teacher. I don’t remember his name, but he was clearly terrified of losing control of his class of boys on the verge of adolescence. I was an outstanding nuisance — different from the others and also conspicuous. When I made three or four other boys laugh in the middle of class, the brother promptly moved me to the front of the class, an unfamiliar location owing to my height. His desk and mine almost touched, or seemed to once his habit of whacking his desk with a yardstick, to emphasize his remarks and to hint at what else he might whack began to bother me. The noise and violence were too close. I folded my arms and put my head down. I was aware of making a statement, a protest, and knew that it might lead to further difficulties, but his racket was intolerable. There were consequences indeed, but as they didn’t involve whacking or any other punishment, I was not perturbed by the subsequent meetings between parents and teacher, or between parents and school principal. The surprise was their decision that I needed medical attention. I’m still somewhat surprised. It still seems perfectly natural to me that behavior such as Brother Yardstick provoked a response such as mine. But, in a moment of weakness, I had said something about headaches: The whacking was giving me headaches. But was this really so? They weren’t any kind of headache that I’d ever had before, just a kind of torture. But I had uttered what turned out to be a dispositive word. Off with me to a neurologist: Dr Robert Knight of Scarsdale.

Dr Knight was tall, slender man with a reserved, unfriendly manner. I believed that he put me down as a malingerer. I did little to help change his mind. As a routine first step, he prescribed an electroencephalogram, to be administered at the Harkness Pavilion of Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital, in  northern Manhattan. My parents and I got dressed up for the procedure, as one did in those days for all encounters with professionals, including jet pilots. Somehow, at Harkness, it was possible for to me to watch the little girl who was ahead of me on line as she was wired up. She had blonde, curly hair, like my sister’s, and she wore a party dress that might have come from my sister’s closet. The technicians’ ruffling of her hair while she was dressed not as a patient but as if, like my sister, she were about to pass hors d’oeuvres at her parents’ cocktail party. It was gruesomely discordant, a kind of humiliation. I vowed on the spot that I would not be put in the same spot. No Frankenstein stuff for me. I became agitated enough to derail any EEG. As we drove home, my mother, too, may have been coming to agree with Dr Knight’s verdict.

The common notion of a memoir is of a testament, a statement of what happened, or at least of what the memoirist remembers. Perhaps because so much time has passed between the period covered in this memoir and my changing responses over the years  to those memories, I have often found myself reinterpreting the underlying events. Until recently, or now, actually, I have seen these two recollected episodes as evidence of my having gotten away with something, in a context where getting away with something was a good thing, or a sort of victory. We always think of having our way in such terms, at least in the short term. But the victory may come to look more like a defeat, a step backward, an opportunity missed forever. It wasn’t so much that getting out of playing baseball or submitting to an EEG deprived me of an opportunity to learn from adversity — I’m still not sure about the actual possibility of learning from adversity, since I have not to my knowledge experienced it; it seems to amount to nothing more than finding out that you can live without pleasure, which I already know perfectly well. No, the bad thing about getting away with these particular things was that I created for myself, as it were, a new passport, or perhaps edited the one I was born with, changing my status from citizen to resident alien. Quite aside from any difference in the schedules of benefits and burdens, I stamped myself as “different” — only to wonder for the rest of my life why, in a negative way that I had not foreseen, I felt different. There was nothing about this difference to certify whether I was now special, or defective. It hardly matters that I was really the only person aware of my altered footing in the world, as someone who didn’t join in games and didn’t undergo humiliating medical tests. What mattered, and what didn’t require anyone else’s concurrence, was that I had cut myself off — as a trapped animal might amputate its own limb in order to escape a trap, and in so doing become irreversibly crippled, diminished.

Do I wish that I’d been made to stand in the sun and lie down in the hospital? No, I don’t think so. What I wish is that I had had the sense to submit without a fuss to ordeals that really were not ordeals at all. What I was missing in childhood was a sense of the big picture, something that is always present to me now, when a misstimed show of defiance by an old man might very well deprive me of autonomy and solitude. I wish that I had not been so keen to feel trapped, that I had been able to see that release would come soon. The mere passage of time would bring the ball game to an end and remove the electrodes from my scalp. And that the unpleasantness would, simply by virtue of my having endured it, pass without consequences, and possibly even without leaving its trace in my memory. What I wish is that I had had faith, that I had been able to trust.