Chapter 2 - Maria - Part 1

Maria Escalante was not Spanish. She did not even look Spanish, though she had when she was a child. It was recently discovered that her father was a gypsy and her mother was Jewish but Maria, having been raised in no less than thirty-seven foster homes and knowing nothing about her heritage, had always just assumed that she was Spanish. The name had been assigned to her by a state agency when she was two, and she never had any problems with it.

Maria went to Stirring Water Christian Fellowship every Sunday. She had chosen a charismatic church because she enoyed watching excited people screaming and hollering more than the sedate catholic masses she was forced to attend while living in foster home numbers six, seventeen, twenty-four and twenty-eight. She was too shy to actually take part in any of the revelry and if anyone had ever asked her, and she was answering honestly, she would have said that the she thought they were all pretending, but she loved to watch the congregation dancing and waving flags and weeping. To Maria, these services were a wonderful pageant about what God could do to you if you let him.

The other members of the church paid little attention to Maria who always sat in the back and would blush and shake her head if asked a direct question. In the first three years she attended Living Water Christian Fellowship she was only mentioned at a church meeting on one occasion. An elder's wife, who had seven children, expressed the opinion that Maria was a homeless woman who just came in for the coffee and bagels and said if she wasn’t going to participate in The Spirit then someone should ask her to leave. The pastor portested that Maria was not hurting anything and pointed out that, even if she wasn’t all together sane, after years and years of witnessing the power of The Lord, The Spirit might one day fill her and she would be saved. The other church members felt that the Pastor was right and they agreed to leave the matter to God.

Maria’s favorite part of the church occurred about two thirds through the service, after the sermon and before the prophecy, when one of the church ladies would take up prayer requests. Sometimes this woman would call up one of the church members who was having a problem and she would put one hand on his or her shoulder, point the other toward the ceiling and would pray out loud for The Lord to provide a solution. Once Maria had seen the lady pray for a young man who had cancer and the next week the man stood up and said that he did not have cancer anymore. Maria did not think that her problems were important enough to have someone tell God about them so she kept them to herself, but she always prayed earnestly for the other people during the service and each night before she went to bed.

Then one day Maria’s life fell apart. She had gone to the grocery store around the corner because upon starting to make Macaroni and Cheese for her three children she had discovered that they were out of milk. She left her oldest son in charge. He was thirteen years old and trustworthy having watched his younger brothers and sisters on several occasions before without incident.

The trip should have taken less than ten minutes but the man in front of Maria's grocery line made a rude comment to the checkout girl and she called the manager. The rude man got very angry and the manager and two stock boys had to drag him out of the store. All of this took some time and then Maria remembered that she had left the stove on. When she called her son from the pay phone, no one answered.

Chapter 1 - "The Thomas Family" - Part 2

Shani Wallis as Nancy in the 1968 Film Version of Oliver!

Oliver proved, to his mother’s disappointment, to be a decidedly normal infant. He was quiet and well behaved, attending his mother’s lectures, concerts, poetry readings and foreign films, with a benign passivity if not the keen interest she had hoped for. At first, with her husband’s encouragement, Eleanor adopted the philosophy that Oliver’s infant brain was still in the process of congealing and that all she had exposed him to would soon become a part of his mind 'like the vodka in a jell-o shot.' But on his third birthday Oliver had still not spoken his first word and Eleanor took a position as head archivist at the Stanislavski Library in Moscow. She left her son and husband in America.

John Thomas, quickly enrolled his boy in the day care center at the television studio where he worked. Each day John went to work, Oliver was put in front of a television for 8 hours of child-psychologist-endorsed children’s programming. By the end of the first week he was speaking in complete sentences.

At nights and on weekends, John Thomas, who had a tendency to be an optimist, devoted himself to the role of the loving single father. He tried to make up for Oliver’s unusual beginning by engaging him in what he considered traditional childhood activities such as visits to the zoo, puppet shows and cartoon-themed pizza restaurants. Every evening, father and son enjoyed friendly chats in front of the television and once a week, they wrote a letter to Eleanor explaining how they missed her, but not to worry they were getting along fine without her.

Nothing else worth noting happened to Oliver between his mother’s departure and the fifteenth of April, 1986. That day, the teacher, a Mrs. Hermann was explaining the significance of April fifteenth as tax day and she brought in copies of her tax forms to be passed around in class.

“See that very small number at the bottom of form w-2? That is how much money I made last year,” was what Mrs. German was saying at the precise moment that form w-2 was passed to Oliver. He stared at the number, wondering if anyone had ever counted that high. Right then, Oliver felt an urge to attempt the feat himself and he began to count silently in his head. He counted all through the lesson, through lunch, recess, the history unit, the story on the carpet, the bus ride home, dinner, prime time television, while he slept and so on.

In the end it took him two and half days to count from one to a second tier elementary school teacher’s salary. He might have finished sooner had he not taken the time to visualize each bill as he counted. When Oliver imagined himself placing the last of the dollar bills on top of the pile, he happened to be on a class field trip to a community college production of the musical Oliver!

Somewhere in the middle of the song “Who Will Buy,” Oliver realized that he was special. Not because we was able to count to five figures or even because he could accurately imagine what that many dollar bills looked like, but because he was able to do all of this and still concentrate on his other daily activities. Oliver realized that he possessed what amounted to two attention spans. He could devote all of his attention to two different tasks individually with no loss of concentration on either. As he realized this, his other attention span was discovering that he was in love with the young woman on stage playing the role of Nancy.

Somehow Oliver made it through all of the events of his childhood with a practical mind a even though he was six, he decided right then that he must take full advantage of his gift. He made two (simultaneous) promises to himself. One, to devote one of his attention spans to writing the most popular play ever written, and two, to one day marry that beautiful young woman. That he was only able to accomplish one of these tasks does not make his life any less remarkable.

Chapter 1 - "The Thomas Family" - Part 1

I wonder how many blog posts begin with "I haven't posted in a while?" I won't do that, I will just say that I am endeavoring to serialize the "novel" I've been working on for several years now in hopes that it will get me to think about it more concretely and eventually, if all goes well, get me serious enough about it to come up with an ending. Some of the chapters are long so I'll split those up and some are small so they will stay intact. Also it doesn't really have a title. I usually refer to it by its nickname "Persephone," though it was originally called "What Was Once Abuse" and I've been thinking lately of calling it "And Not We Ourselves."

I hope to add an installment every Friday.

Here goes nothing,

Ian

Chapter 1
The Thomas Family

Stanislavsky as Gaev in The Cherry Orchard

Few people remember that Eleanor Thomas was famous of her own right even before she gave birth to the most important playwright since Shakespeare. A self-improvement book she had written entitled, “Your life in Art” appeared on a few best seller lists and led to a number of talk show appearances. The book, “an insightful, even ingenious plan for living a well-ordered and inspired life,” according to the London Review of Books, was based on the writings of the great Russian actor and director Konstantin Stanislavsky. Eleanor’s method, however, had very little to do with acting. Instead she drew on Stanislavsky’s ideas about inspiration, relaxation and “lines of action” to create a philosophy from which, she claimed, “all people, through concentration and discipline can become commanding players on the world stage.”

Mrs. Thomas’ opponents criticized her ideas as overly simplistic and “advocating phonyism,” but the open-minded reader will find much about the book worthwhile, even when considered separately (impossible as that is) from the life and works for her son. Some of the stronger ideas in the work are Mrs. Thomas’ assertion that if a person desires a change in his or her personality he or she must behave as if this change has already happened and through discipline and practice this change will become an first an emotional truth then, shortly after, a truth in reality as well. The book also puts a great deal of emphasis on setting an ultimate goal and then defining a clear path in which everything one does moves one forward toward that goal. The most inspired chapter of “Your Life in Art,” however, is the section on inspiration itself. “We cannot control inspiration,” she wrote. “It is a force not unlike the weather. But anyone who cares at all about the great benefits of an inspired state will do well to be prepared for inspiration when it does decide to rain down upon us.” I would go so far as to say that anyone who cares at all about Oliver Fagin Thomas will do well understand this philosophy; at least as much as it pertains to his infancy and early childhood.

Eleanor Thomas’ first and only pregnancy occurred at a time of a harsh critical backlash against her book and it seems that she viewed her unborn child as the perfect proving ground for her theories. Eleanor spent most of the first trimester devising a system for giving birth to the most inspired child possible and over the final six months of gestation, she exposed the growing fetus to as much culture as possible. Some of this was achieved by the more obvious methods of reading and playing music into her belly but she also did a great deal of traveling specifically with the intent of breathing a variety of types of air. Some who knew her at the time have noted that the expectant mother could very often be seen simply describing out loud everything she could see in minute detail.

Eleanor knew early on that she was going to have a boy and, after careful deliberation, decided she would name him Oliver Fagin Thomas. Naming her son after the hero and villain of her favorite book, she thought, would create a child who could understand contrast and conflict--two ideas that in combination often lead to inspiration. She was often asked if the brutally evil Bill Sikes would have been a better choice of a middle name, as Bill was nothing but a negative character while one could feel sympathy for the crafty Fagin. “I would never associate my son with that horrible killer,” she would reply and hear nothing else of the argument.

The moment of birth was planned out in intricate detail. Oliver was to be born at home and a small party was arranged to welcome him into the world. A brass band was hired to play a welcome march and a group of fifteen friends were invited to attend. Noisemakers were to be distributed as the guests drank champagne and ate from a buffet table stocked with the finest delicacies of international cuisine. Although Oliver would not be able to eat any of these things, he could at least begin his life smelling them.

The room was absolutely dark when Oliver arrived. The doctor delivered him into a wading pool of warmed saline solution and the baby was allowed to float, still receiving oxygen from the umbilical cord, in absolute darkened silence for nearly five minutes as the band and the guests and the buffet were brought into the room.

Then, on Eleanor’s signal, the baby was lifted out and the strobe light turned on. The noise of the band, the cheers, the popping of corks and the fireworks drowned out his first cry.