Bloch House

I was nine years old.
Dusk
on the last Sunday of Summer before the Fall school year.
Cool, crisp, frenetic sun-swept breezes
playfully frisked a youthful pride of
swirling, posturing, rambunctious bicycle riders.

Tacitly aware of the seasonal change
from unregimented to regimented time
looming like some sickly, constricted breath over all,
we,
in celebration of the last evening of unbridled id,
perched anxious atop the crest of the hill,
were about to plunge,
in ecstatic descent after ecstatic descent,
until such a time
that the smiling light would fade into a darkening scowl,
and
parental voices plaintively admonished the darkness.

The euphoric moment of release was at hand,
when a sudden
violent, frantic cry cleaved the impish, high-spirited air.
The eleven year old Suzy Bloch,
barefoot
long, blond hair matted, disheveled,
dressed in nothing but a loose-fitting, powder-blue t-shirt,
ran crazed,
as if mortally wounded,
toward us.
Eyes wild, tears and mucus streaming,
the inconsolable Suzy,
amid grief-stricken, inarticulate, guttural sobs,
ran from bike to bike violently shaking the handle bars,
until,
fleeing behind two billowing, weeping-birch trees,
the howling Cassandra vanished into the woods.

A stunned silence ushered in the arrival of Suzy's father.
Dr. Konrad Bloch, a German emigre,
a man of wickedly few words,
with a face emanating a bottomless hurt,
and whose overall demeanor exuded the joie de vivre
of a Swedish, Lutheran pastor contemplating suicide,
a man who so rarely smiled
I can still remember vividly a day when he did.

Summer,
the community swimming pool,
children splashing, parents gossiping
until a wave of silence,
as the the good doctor,
heretofore not seen in these parts,
skin pink as a scrubbed, blue-ribboned 4-H pig,
black towel over his shoulders, black bathing suit, black socks and sandals
emerged from the men's restroom.
There was a smile on his face so altogether incongruent
the only way to describe it is an
exquisite portrayal of Malvolio's expression of admiration for his yellow garters.
Walking to the water's edge, he peered virtuously at the wetness,
hesitated,
then continued around the pool, intermittently pausing to dip a brave toe,
until, at long last,
he evaporated out the fenced pool door, never to return.
(Later that evening I learned he had just won the Nobel Prize for medicine,
something about 'cloressterol').

But now he stood rigid, insistent, deranged,
dumbly imploring for his daughter's whereabouts.
His eyes radiated, what to us, was the unfathomable holocaust,
at what, in turn, must have been to him,
a pack of adolescent, amoral and primeval centaurs.
As if in some expressionistic modern dance,
we simultaneously raised pointed fingers in the direction of the weeping birch.
Disappearing in the dusk,
his calls for Suzy were echoed by his wife's soft, morose bleating.
Mama Bloch, who tentatively materialized from behind the front door,
was a woman immersed in such a deep, sorrowful reticence,
I have no visual recollection of her whatsoever.
To my mind's eye the smothered, faceless creature is
the antipodal Cheshire Cat,
except her doleful features never actually materialize,
and all that remains is an oppressive aura of maternal anguish.

The plaintive duet grew into an atonal, syncopated chorus
as some of our more attentive parents
pierced the growing darkness with cries of their own.
Upon the exchange of significant, silent glances,
a few pedaling, but most soberly walking their bikes,
we - sullen, fragmented, disheartened - dispersed.
After a few steps, I turned to look back,
but where once an infectious, frenzied intoxication delighted,
there was now nothing, nothing but the wind
and the gathering, inevitable nightfall.