Version MEEF 1

Paul Auster, The Locked Room (1985).

One incident is particularly vivid to me. It concerns a birthday party that Fanshawe
and I were invited to in the first or second grade, which means that it falls at the very
beginning of the period I am able to talk about with any precision. It was a Saturday afternoon
in spring, and we walked to the party with another boy, a friend of ours named Dennis
Walden. Dennis had a much harder life than either of us did: an alcoholic mother, an
overworked father, innumerable brothers and sisters. I had been to his house two or three
times – a great, dark ruin of a place – and I can remember being frightened by his mother,
who made me think of a fairy tale witch. She would spend the whole day behind the closed
door of her room, always in her bathrobe, her pale face a nightmare of wrinkles, poking her
head out every now and then to scream something at the children. On the day of the party,
Fanshawe and I had been duly equipped with presents to give the birthday boy, all wrapped in
colourful paper and tied with ribbons. Dennis, however, had nothing, and he felt bad about it.
I can remember trying to console him with some empty phrase or other: it didn’t matter, no
one really cared, in all the confusion it wouldn’t be noticed. But Dennis did care, and that was
what Fanshawe immediately understood. Without any explanation, he turned to Dennis and
handed him his present. Here, he said, take this one – I’ll tell them I left mine at home. My
first reaction was to think that Dennis would resent the gesture, that he would feel insulted by
Fanshawe’s pity. But I was wrong. He hesitated for a moment, trying to absorb this sudden
change of fortune, and then nodded his head, as if acknowledging the wisdom of what
Fanshawe had done. It was not an act of charity so much as an act of justice, and for that
reason Dennis was able to accept it without humiliating himself. The one thing had been
turned into the other. It was a piece of magic, a combination of off-handedness and total
conviction, and I doubt that anyone but Fanshawe could have pulled it off.