The Kingdom of Childhood Read online

  The Kingdom of Childhood

  Rebecca Coleman

  The Kingdom of Childhood

  The Kingdom of Childhood

  A Novel

  REBECCA COLEMAN

  To Catherine

  “The wiser being in us leads us to this person because of a relationship in a previous life… We are led to this person as though by magic. We now reach a manifold and intricate realm…our youthful energies begin to decline. We move past a climax, and from there we move downward.”

  “You have no idea how unimportant is all that the teacher says or does not say on the surface, and how important what he himself is as teacher.”

  —Rudolf Steiner

  Contents

  Prologue

  PART I: THE QUEEN OF FASCHING

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  PART II: ZXP

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Acknowlegements

  Questions for Discussion

  Prologue

  In Bavaria the snow is always very deep. Once the first flakes fall it quickly buries everything that rests on the country earth: hedgehog nests, lost underpants, drawings of a crucified Jesus clumsily wrought in colored pencil, worn bars of Fels-Naptha laundry soap good for removing most stains. I have seen all of these things vanish beneath that snow that rots everything, and if ever there was anything colder or more beautiful than a German winter I have yet to experience it.

  But when I was a girl of only ten, stumbling through my first months in that country where I was more alone than I have ever been before or since, where even my teachers babbled nonsensical words at me and my mother’s mind grew knottier by the day, I could hardly understand that I should appreciate such loveliness with my whole heart, because, rest assured, things would get worse for me. That year I felt home sick for Baltimore, where the winter sky teased for months and then, perhaps late in February, would shake loose its clouds in an orgy of the stuff that snapped power lines, threw cars into a whirl, and brought our modest, industrious little city to its knees. I preferred a good crisis to a dependable case of cabin fever. But in any case I spent much of that winter outdoors, with my mother gone, my father putting the house to other uses.

  Every day I had to stomp through the drifts to catch the school bus. Back then we all wore dresses like Caroline Kennedy, our skirts swirly and pert and often impractical, and what a cross that was to bear. The icy water would seep through my tights and then I’d be bone-cold until lunchtime.

  One morning, it must have been a Saturday I suppose, I went out to play in that snow. It was a fresh snowfall and still looked magical. We had learned a song in school, in Ger man of course, about a walk through the snow, and I sang it as I marched through the field across from my house, turning around to look at my boot prints. I didn’t understand all the words, but the song had a very sweet tune, ethereal, you would say. And amid snow everything seems so very silent, you know, I imagine I must have enjoyed how clear and alone my voice sounded.

  Down the road lived my classmate Daniela and her brother Rudi, who was older and went to the high school. I often spent time in the barn with him in the afternoons, biding the last of the daylight in the quiet and the peace of nature, away from our rented home. Well, I suppose he must have heard me while he was working in the barn, because next thing I knew he was waving his big hand from across the field, and then he bounded over to me in those thick rubber boots, calling, Judy, Judy. He asked me if I liked to sled. I told him I did, even though my mother always forbade it because she said it was too dangerous. But I thought it sounded exciting, because when I was small she had often read to me from a book of children’s poetry, and I remembered the poem that began—

  Come fly with me, said the little red sled I’ll give you the wings of a bird, it said

  —and beside it there was a drawing of a little Flexible Flyer with a smiling face. He told me his sister Daniela had a cold and couldn’t go, but that he would take me if I liked. And so I ignored my mother’s warnings, and I went with him.

  He fetched a sled from the barn—it was a toboggan, really—and we walked through the field to the churchyard. First we passed the shrine to the Virgin Mary, and then there was an old graveyard, and downhill from it, an empty lawn covered by a smooth snowdrift. The hill was quite steep in some places, and in others, not so steep but very long. I was afraid to go down by myself, so Rudi climbed on behind me—goodness knows how, because he was so big and I remember the toboggan was shorter than I was—and down we went. What a thrill it was, the way the cold air rushed across my face and filled my lungs as we flew past everything at once. I thought, this is the way the astronauts must feel, because that was during the Space Race, and adults were always telling children what an amazing time we lived in because of it.

  In a short while I could go down the slower hills alone, but the steeper ones I only dared if Rudi sat behind me. I felt like I could do anything if he was there. It sounds silly to say it, but sometimes, when it was time to go home after visiting him in the barn, I felt like clinging to his leg like a toddler and burying my face in his waist, and begging him, please don’t make me go back there. I tell you, he must have thought I was the peskiest child. Lord knows why he tolerated me. I suppose it was his weight that made the sled feel so much safer with him on it. And he could brace his legs along mine, which must have made me feel as though I couldn’t fall out.

  In my memory we went up and down the hill for hours, although it couldn’t have been nearly that long. A few times the toboggan overturned, tumbling both of us into the snow, and I remember his laugh when that happened. Jolly, as if he were really having fun. I don’t recall the trip back to the house, only that it was warm when we got there.

  I mean his house, not mine. I had never been inside past the mudroom, but this time he brought me into the kitchen and sat me down at the little table. It was a modern kitchen but on the wall there hung those carved wooden molds for spice cookies—lebkuchen, they called them. One was carved with Struwwelpeter, a horrible character from a book they made us study in school. A boy, but with yellow hair in a frizz like a monster’s fur, and sad, vacant eyes. His fingernails twisted like claws and he wore a prim schoolboy outfit on his deformed little body. I remember I asked Rudi, who would want to eat a cookie shaped like Struwwelpeter? And he laughed.

  He said, Your tights are wet, take them off. And so I did. He helped me pull them off when they twisted around my ankles, then sat on the floor before me and rubbed my feet and toes to warm them. Your feet are like ice cream, he said. He meant that they were like ice, but the word for both is the same in German. Then he took my tights and hung them by the woodstove, and gave me a cookie to eat while we waited for them to dry.

  The cookies were lebkuchen, although the round type, not made in molds like the ones on the walls. They tasted of cinnamon and cloves and the dark, syrupy flavor of the honey the bees made in the deep pine woods nearby. I remembered such cookies from Christmas, and
Rudi said they were left over; but this kind had a smooth, white, starchy disk on the underside, and I asked him what it was. He said the disks were called oblaten, that sometimes people spooned the cookie dough onto them before baking and sometimes they didn’t. He liked them either way. Then he said, do you know, they are the same type of wafer used by the priest during Mass. Exactly the same, only not blessed. So if you put a blessing on it, it becomes the Body of Christ. And if you do not, you can use it to make a cookie.

  I thought that was interesting, that my cookie could have been something sacred. But instead, here I sat beside the woodstove with my tights dangling from the back of a chair, with my classmate’s older brother beside me, eating a honey cookie. And there was nothing holy about it at all.

  Well, that’s all I remember. After my tights dried I put them on and went home, I suppose. In the spring, when Easter came and I happened upon the shrine again, I realized that lawn beyond the old graveyard was actually the new graveyard, where the markers were metal plaques that lay flush against the ground. So that day Rudi and I had gone sledding, we had all the while been sledding across the graves of the dead. I don’t know if he realized that, although I imagine he did, having lived in that town all his life. Maybe it didn’t matter to him. Or maybe he thought the dead would not begrudge the living a bit of joy.

  I thought about this story many years later, as I stood at the grave of my best friend, Bobbie, surrounded by all of our teaching colleagues and a few of our friends from college. I had never mentioned Rudi to her, and I wondered if now, with her beautiful spirit freed from the confines of its dim human senses, she somehow knew even the few secrets I had kept from her. Let me explain, I wanted to say, but of course it was much too late for that now.

  At the graveside service, the minister offered what he must have believed were words of comfort. Do not despair, he said, that the dead are lost to us forever. We will meet them again in eternity, for that is the hope we have in Christ Jesus. I folded my arms over my chest and knew I agreed with him that the spirit lives on, but I would never sentimentalize it so. It is a painful thing to have unresolved business with the dead. But the dead have unresolved business with us, too.

  PART I

  THE QUEEN OF FASCHING

  1

  1998

  Sylvania, Maryland

  I suppose in the beginning it was a love story. The school into which I had wandered, following my midwife’s directions to sign up for a natural-childbirth class held there in the evenings, was a fairy-tale cottage of apricot walls and cabinetry built from knotty pine. In the kindergarten room, knitted dolls waited in a line beneath a large bright window; wooden fish, painted in pale washes of color, leaped from a swirl of blue silk arranged on a shelf. At the center of it all sat a lantern, nestled among the seashells and pine cones strewn on a small table. Its blue overlay was decorated with the silhouette of a young girl with her skirt held out, catching in it the stars that fell like coins from the sky. I knew it was a scene from a fairy tale, one I had heard many years before on the other side of the ocean. I remembered many stories from that place and that time, but this one was notable in that it ended in happiness and not horror.

  The teacher who found me standing loose-jawed in her room, one hand on my burgeoning belly and the other on my hip, did not need to ask me if I had ever been in a Waldorf school before. The answer was obvious enough from my gaze of uninhibited wonder, and as I was soon to learn, every aspect of the Waldorf life is meant to inspire that feeling which rose in me very naturally, as though I were a tired pioneer stumbling into a lush valley and suddenly declaring, “This is the place.” I didn’t question why that room pulled at me so intensely, because as soon as I walked in, I knew: it reminded me of the school I had attended as a child in Germany, with shiny leaves of ivy hanging like garlands above the windows, a guitar beside the teacher’s desk, and the tables outfitted with wooden boxes of beeswax crayons in colors so hard and bright that they carried an elemental cheer. The boxes contained many colors, but not black. Black was not allowed. I received this information like a coded phrase: here we have your German childhood, and we have removed the black crayon.

  Now, nineteen years later, I had shepherded hundreds of kindergartners through their introduction to our brand of wonder, watercolors and the occasional case of ringworm. The baby traveling upside-down in my womb that day, blissfully ignorant of her mother’s budding fanaticism—my daughter Maggie—had attended Waldorf clear through to college. Scott, my son, was in his final year of high school, and he was finishing up not a moment too soon. The school year had only just begun, and already my boss, Dan Beckett, had opened our Monday-morning staff meeting with an announcement that Sylvania Waldorf School was financially insolvent and might go under at any moment. This was a regular weekly feature during the previous year, and so that morning I sat at a student desk listening to him in respectful silence, toying with my earring and musing idly on the erotic dream I’d had about him the night before. My love affair with Waldorf was still alive in my soul, but until the new boss arrived it had never occurred to me that it might be consummated.

  If I was distracted that day, a reasonable person could hardly blame me. By lunchtime I had dealt with two potty accidents and one black eye on a scrappy student who, quite honestly, had it coming. In the afternoon I sent home a child showing symptoms of measles to two panicky parents suddenly reconsidering their commitment to holistic medicine. Now, at long last, my mug of coffee and I made our way down the covered walkway that connected the Upper and Lower Schools. My son Scott’s choir practice was almost over, and with that I would finally be able to go home and crawl into bed under a pile of duvets. Hopefully the oxygen deprivation would knock me out quickly.

  Rounding the corner to the multipurpose room, I felt a bit more relaxed just to hear the beatific voices of my son and his choirmates. The madrigal choir was by invitation only, and sang, for the most part, medieval and Renaissance songs a capella. Scott, a senior, had a fine voice but no particular love of music. He stayed in Madrigals because the school required an extracurricular and he found the other options, in a word, “lame.”

  As I slipped in the back door I spotted the small group clustered on the risers at one side of the stage. Drawing closer, I could pick out Scott’s voice in the baritone section. They sang The Holly and the Ivy in preparation, I assumed, for the Advent Spiral ceremony around the holidays. They were certainly getting an early start.

  I sat in a folding chair and sipped my coffee. As their teacher issued a few parting instructions and the group dispersed, Scott meandered toward me with two other young men in tow: Temple, the quiet boy with whom he had been friends since first grade, and another one I did not recognize. Hitchhikers, I predicted.

  “Hey, Mom,” Scott said. “Do you mind giving a couple people a ride home?”

  The trio lagged behind me on the way out to the parking lot, with one of them—the extra one, from his voice—singing a potty-mouthed parody of The Holly and the Ivy to the delight of his friends. By the time they piled into the back of the Volvo, the conversation had reverted to the two-syllable monotone of teenage boys.

  “Who lives closest?” I asked, turning out of the parking lot.

  “I do,” said the crude one. “Left on Crescent, right on Lakeside, follow it down.”

  I turned up the radio and tried to think ahead to my evening, rather than backward to the terrible day, without much success. Three of my students, now, were out with the measles, with a fourth case likely in the works. At any other school this would be a cause for alarm, but many of the parents in our school community had reservations about immunizing their children, and as a result we had periodic outbreaks of arcane diseases. Although the teachings of Rudolf Steiner, the originator of our school’s philosophy, supported some of these ideas, I did not share their view. I had thought myself a rebel to society at large when I joined the Waldorf School movement, yet once inside the community I chafed just as often
, but kept my dissents secret. I vaccinated my children, circumcised my son. I owned not one but two televisions. I ate plastic-wrapped American cheese.

  The voice of the new boy rose from the backseat. “Monica Lewinsky walks into a dry cleaner who’s a little hard of hearing.”

  Scott’s enthusiasm was immediate. “Ooh, Temple, have you heard this one?”

  “Uh-uh.”

  “Monica says, ‘I’ve got another dress for you to clean.’ The dry cleaner says, ‘Come again?’ and Monica says, ‘No, it’s mustard.’”

  Scott and Temple dissolved into laughter. I glanced into the rearview mirror and caught the gaze of the boy, his broad grin conveying pride at his own joke. Black hair, razor-cut at the edges, mostly hid one of his eyes, but the other sparkled with mischief. I raised my eyebrows at him in the mirror.

  “Not a good joke for mixed company,” I said.

  “Sorry, Mrs. McFarland,” he replied with great insincerity.

  “Yeah, Zach,” Scott added, clearly gleeful at the chance to gang up on his friend. “Don’t talk to my mom like that. What’s your problem?”

  Muted thuds ensued, the sound of punches being thrown. When I came to a stop at a traffic light I turned around and barked, “Knock it off!”

  Temple, in the middle seat between the two, looked relieved as Scott and his friend quickly straightened up. After years of being a double authority over Scott’s buddies—both parent and teacher—I was not shy about correcting them. I looked the black-haired one in the eye again and demanded, “How old are you?”

  “Sixteen.”